Dear Friends of Election Integrity (apologies for
duplicate postings),
Thank you all so much for help with this year's bad election
bill. We will be working to improve the situation next year. We
are Coloradans For Voting Integrity (http://cfvi.us),
Citizen Center (www [ . ] The Citizen Center ["at"] org), and
Colorado Voter Group (http://coloradovotergroup.org).
For any of you who would like to be more active on this front,
we are accepting new members or even people who would like to
get just the press announcements. We need brain power and
dedication more than money, though that's a good thing also.
Write or call me if you are interested or would like to learn
more.
When the Denver Post says below, "Many
of those activists, it should be noted, have followed election
issues closely for years and know a thing or two about them,"
they are talking about us. And they really are talking about you
too because the Governor would not have hesitated a moment to
sign the bill if you hadn't written to him with your concerns.
Thank you again.
With warm regards,
Mary
Mary C. Eberle
1520 Cress Court
Boulder, CO 80304
303 442-2164
Editorial: A step back on Colorado election rules
It's
too bad the governor bought the arguments of the state's
county clerks on a ballot-counting bill.
Posted:
06/12/2012 01:00:00 AM MDT
Updated: 06/12/2012 05:42:30 AM MDT
By The Denver Post
It
was perhaps inevitable that Gov. John Hickenlooper would sign a
controversial bill governing public access to voted ballots that
we and many concerned observers had urged him to veto. After
all, the bill was vocally supported by elected county clerks.
Not only do they understand the business of conducting elections
better than anyone, they claimed the sky might fall if he didn't
sign the bill.
The governor obviously had reservations about House Bill 1036,
which he outlined in his signing message, but they unfortunately
weren't strong enough for him to defy the opinion of the expert
Chicken Littles.
Too bad. Colorado now has an election system with a privileged
class of people — not only candidates but also political parties
and representatives of issue committees that gave money to
ballot measures — who may inspect voted ballots when everyone
else, including the media, is excluded.
Those of us in the non-privileged majority will not have access
to voted ballots until after elections are certified — too late,
citizen activists persuasively argue, for effective public
oversight. Many of those activists, it should be noted, have
followed election issues closely for years and know a thing or
two about them, too.
Ironically, the legislation was supposedly about protecting
citizen access to election records, even though the courts
had done a pretty good job in that regard during the run-up to
the legislative session. It seems clear in retrospect that the
bill was designed in part to help clerks keep the pesky public
at bay and to insulate current procedures that the clerks
themselves admit leave some ballots traceable.
If you thought the state constitution mandates that ballots be
anonymous and untraceable, you'd be correct. So why
didn't the legislature try to do something to ensure that
election procedures do not undermine this fundamental
expectation?
Rather than try to resolve underlying problems that lead to
potentially traceable ballots, the new law simply grants clerks
broad discretion to hold back problematic ballots from
open-records requests.
Meanwhile, it provides no incentive for officials to change the
procedures that create potentially traceable ballots in the
first place.
In his statement, Hickenlooper said that "it is important that
the public have reasonable access to ballots before an election
is certified. ... We believe this public interest could be
better protected if the scope of the [Colorado Open Records Act]
blackout was more narrowly tailored."
Secretary of State Scott Gessler has said he thinks the new law
could use some tweaking, too.
But will clerks cooperate with a future rewrite now that they've
got what they wanted? This step backward for government
transparency could be extremely difficult to rectify.
Editorial: A step back on Colorado
election rules - The Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_20834247/editorial-step-back-election-rules?source=rss#ixzz1xaxuJxip