Under the agreement, voters removed from the rolls will be permitted to cast provisional ballots, and those ballots will be counted unless election officials can prove the voters were not eligible. To strike such ballots, county election officials must conduct an extensive records review on each one, a decision that must then be reviewed by Mr. Coffman’s office.If ALL provisional ballots were treated this way, they wouldn't be nicknamed "placebo ballots". No one wants anyone to vote illegally, but the notion that we should disenfranchise tens of thousands in an effort to prevent a few hundred (or less) people from casting illegal ballots is absurd.
Friday, October 31, 2008
Colorado Voter Purge Stopped
Big news in the fight against voter suppression just came in from CO. In a monumentally rational move, it was decided that votes should be counted unless they are known to be bad, instead of being assumed to be bad from the outset:
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The voters’ names had been removed by Mike Coffman, the Colorado secretary of state, who said he did so because the voters had moved out of state or were listed more than once on the rolls. But Mr. Coffman was sued by a coalition of voting rights and other groups who said such purges were generally prohibited by federal law within 90 days of an election.
Interesting article. Interesting bio. Very Republican with a few twists. (Could be competition for Palin in the primaries;-)
Also there:
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, Common Cause of Colorado, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund have accused the Secretary of State's office of improperly marking 6,400 voter registration forms as incomplete, because they failed to check a box on the form. Incomplete registrations require voters to either re-register or provide extra identification when they go to vote.
Hurray for the groups that pushed him into making the right decision. (A donation might be in order.)
This may become the gold standard in voter rights. I think we will look back on the 2000-2008 period as an embarrassing aberration in many ways.
Yep. There hasn't been a lot of talk about it, presumably to avoid potential right-wing ammunition, but I'm hopeful that Obama will make election reform one of his first jobs. Fixing the problems with the HAVA and requiring a voter verified paper trail on all machines would go a long way.
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