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Clerk: 1,700 voters have registration problems
Forms must be fixed by Election Day
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Although the deadline has passed to register to vote in next month’s general election, Boulder County officials said Tuesday that some people still have work to do before casting ballots.
So far, about 1,700 registration forms have been identified by the Clerk and Recorder’s Office as not being completed according to Colorado law.
Those people — who didn’t check an appropriate box, missed a signature or otherwise failed to fill out the form completely — will still be allowed to vote come Nov. 4, so long as they return a letter being mailed out over the next two weeks.
The letters will contain a message including what was missing, how to fix it and a pre-paid return envelope, said clerk and recorder spokeswoman Jessie Cornelius.
“We encourage people to do it as soon as possible, but they do have until Election Day,” she said.
The letters will all be mailed out by Oct. 19, Cornelius said.
Anyone who receives a letter but doesn’t send it back by Oct. 27 is asked to instead bring the letter in person to the clerk’s office at 1750 33rd St. in Boulder.
Cornelius said registrations filled out at the clerk’s office, sent by mail or completed at independent voter registration drives are all processed the same, and letters will be sent to anyone found to have missing information.
Still, election officials are asking voters to check their registration status online at www.voteboulder.org.
On Monday, the last day to register for the general election, the Boulder clerk’s office was flooded with residents eager to vote next month. County employees helped hundreds of people move through the registration process, Cornelius said.
“It was extremely busy,” she said. “The phones were ringing all day. It was pretty much constant, with people coming in all day.”
Final tallies on last-day registrations weren’t available Tuesday, but officials said at least 15,000 forms requesting changes of address or mail-in ballots still needed to be recorded into the computer system.
Posted by andy on October 7, 2008 at 9:10 p.m. (Suggest removal)
I insist on detailed reporting tracking the progress of all 1,700 and alerting us to any irregularities. I want to know how each of the 1,700 voters feels. Scared? Disenfranchised?
Posted by Ralphie2 on October 7, 2008 at 9:29 p.m. (Suggest removal)
We need to figure this out. Boulder could be this election's Dade County.
Don't let the Republicans pull this stuff again!
Posted by glock27 on October 7, 2008 at 10:44 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Ralphie:
The Democrats ran Dade county just as they run Boulder. The Democrats and their agents, like ACORN, are masters of election corruption.
Posted by meatpieandtatters on October 7, 2008 at 11 p.m. (Suggest removal)
andy, why don't you instead insist upon voter education? The act of voting is so trivial when compared the weight of the overall process. Heck, most people, after they vote, go back into a 3 year coma and the cycle repeats.
I'd suggest a refresher course by watching Zeitgeist: Addendum @ http://tinyurl.com/44zfgx
Posted by spud on October 8, 2008 at 8:12 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Just call ACORN! They have a history of getting people registered that are not eligible.
Posted by andy on October 8, 2008 at 8:21 a.m. (Suggest removal)
glock, Ralphie was surely being facetious. If not, with serious comments like that, who needs mockery?
Posted by blacksho89 on October 8, 2008 at 9:22 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Even IF ralphie was facetious, there are enough people out there who truly believe that Republicans run Dade County (and Cook County) that it is worthwhile to mention.
Posted by ewilson on October 8, 2008 at 9:24 a.m. (Suggest removal)
It's so predictable. When 1700 voters are assumed to be mostly Liberals, there must be accountability, reporting and the word "disenfranchisement" begins to surface. People start making excuses that no one's right to vote should hinge on whether they followed the law, or whether they checked the right box.
But if 1700 voters are presumed to be Republican, oh nooooo.... they must follow the rules!
Liberals = A bunch of whiney, angry, double-standard humps.
Posted by johnny.sunshine on October 8, 2008 at 12:35 p.m. (Suggest removal)
There's a continuing myth among Republicans that there are hordes of people out there voting who have no right to vote. If you examine registrations, there are errors - often caused by typos by the people putting them into the system, or by poor people being paid by the application submitted who want more money - but very very few of these 8 year olds, or dogs, or invisible men, or Bugs Bunnies, actually try to VOTE. They're just registration errors.
Far more serious are the (usually Republican) efforts to suppress votes. These often actually prevent dozens or hundreds of people from voting. I heard on NPR this morning that right now there's a campaign in Indiana in which flyers are being distributed in poor black neighborhoods saying that anyone with outstanding parking tickets or other government issues will be arrested if they try to vote. (False.) I won't belabor this board with tales of Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004.
Tampering with the vote is a felony, I believe, and should be prosecuted - but it should be prosecuted in proportion to the number of votes it affects. If that were done, it would be revealed that it's overwhelmingly a Republican crime.
For one, Karl Rove would be serving consecutive life sentences, as would Alberto Gonzalez. Voter suppression is at the heart of the US Attorneys scandal that he's currently ducking a Congressional subpoena to avoid inquiry into.
Curiously, the two ways to actually commit large scale vote fraud are mail-in voting (because no one has to actually appear and risk a felony arrest) and voting machines with insecure software (the Diebold/Premier voting machine executives have been big Republican contributors, and their machines have been shown to be easily hacked.)
No evidence of large scale fraud with either method yet, in this country anyway, but by definition successful fraud isn't detected. There doesn't seem to be much effort to suppress mail-in ballots, interestingly, perhaps because in most jurisdictions voters who prefer that tend to skew older and more Republican.
[Vote fraud] never prospers, what's the reason? For if it prospers, none dare calls it [vote fraud.]
Want more on this? Found this in my travels (lots of links from there):
http://www.slate.com/id/2166589/
Posted by BRM on October 8, 2008 at 1:53 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Wait Republicans don't cheat? I'll redirect your attention to 2000 and 2004. Some of you need reminding! How about the "hired voters" who did nothing but clog election lines in Ohio, causing many voters (on BOTH sides) to not be able to vote at all. Typical GOP/Rove-type crap. "Win at all costs and damn the country to hell for 4 more years" The GOP could care less for this country, or any other for that matter. Shame on them! Not a "Patriot" in the bunch!!
Posted by BRM on October 8, 2008 at 1:59 p.m. (Suggest removal)
ewilson: someone else sounds a bit whiney(sic) / angry too! Oh, and double-standards? Like being pro-life and pro-death penalty at the same time? I guess it's all in the timing huh? Another hypocrite for McCain I guess?
Posted by BRM on October 8, 2008 at 2:08 p.m. (Suggest removal)
McCain keeps asking: "who is Barack Obama?" Well I would counter "who is John McCain?"
Find out all about the "maverick" here:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/cove...
He makes Dub'ya look like an upstanding citizen!!
Posted by Stan_Weekes on October 8, 2008 at 5:04 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Yesterday, the Nevada Sec of State's office raided ACORN's Las Vegas headquarters looking for evidence of voter fraud.
"Some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications," Walsh said, describing the complaints, which largely came from the registrar in Clark County, Nev.
"But it's not the first time ACORN's been under investigation for registration irregularities. The raid is the latest of at least nine investigations into possible fraudulent voter registration forms submitted by ACORN -- the probes have involved ACORN workers in Wisconsin, New Mexico, Indiana and other states."
In 2006, ACORN also committed what Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed called the "worse case of election fraud" in the state's history.
In the case, ACORN submitted just over 1,800 new voter registration forms, and all but six of the 1,800 names were fake.
'More recently, 27,000 registrations handled by the group from January to July 2008 "went into limbo because they were incomplete, inaccurate, or fraudulent," said James Terry, chief public advocate at the Consumers Rights League.'
http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/10/...
Posted by Stan_Weekes on October 8, 2008 at 10:35 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Washington State
Robert Edelman v. Secretary of State Sam Reed
Secretary of State Reed has allowed 16 and 17-year-olds voters to register to vote, violating the state constitution and federal laws that require him to ensure the state voter roll contains only legal voters.
Summary
EFF researcher Robert Edelman found more than 16,000 registrations by people who would not have been 18 by the next election, as the Washington Constitution requires for eligibility to vote. The registrations occurred between January 2000 and March 2008.
*
According to emails from staff and database records, the Secretary of State knows that county auditors accept registration applications from underage voters, and he knows that there are underage voters on the voter roll.
*
In addition, Secretary Reed has condoned the unlawful practice of auditors accepting voter registration forms from underage applicants, some as young as 16, and holding them in a drawer for months until the voter is 18.
*
What’s at stake?
* The accuracy of the state voter database, which will be used by the county auditors to mail ballots for the general election. Every voter in that database will be mailed a ballot or will be able to easily obtain one.
* The integrity of Washington elections. Nearly 2000 illegal votes were cast in the 2004 gubernatorial race, and most were due to felon, deceased, duplicate and other ineligible voters who were still on the voter registration rolls.
* Whether the Secretary of State has a duty to actually prevent known ineligible voters from registering to vote, or if his only duty is to identify them once they have been added to the voting roll and hope the county auditors will remove them.
*
http://www.effwa.org/main/page.php?nu...
Posted by Stan_Weekes on October 13, 2008 at 10:32 a.m. (Suggest removal)
When you view the law concerning qualifications to register to vote you find that a name, address, birth date and an affirmation of honesty are the only real requirements. Because Colorado does not require proof of Citizenship, one of the basic elements involving the vote remains somewhat a mystery. Thus, few clues are available to aid any investigation of fraud, leaving the check boxes, in effect, legal statements concerning basic facts. Those little bits of information are the only methods to verify the integrity of the affirmation. The seemingly simple instructions supply data, without adding additional verbiage, for state wide comparisons, and potentially an audit trail.
So, all you need to do is swear to tell the truth about your name ID, address, and citizenship. The vote deserves more integrity than that. To just give you a unique number, that's traceable to only your address, seems counter intuitive to 'qualified voter'.
--from the County Clerk form:
"Pursuant to Federal Law, your completed voter registration form must contain your State of Colorado Driver's License Number or your Dept. of Revenue Identification Number.
If you do not have a Driver's License or Dept. of Revenue Identification Number, then you must provide the last four digits of your Social Security Number.
If you do not have a Driver's License Number, a Dept. of Revenue Identification Number, or a Social Security Number, you must check the appropriate boxes.
A unique identifying number will be assigned to you by the State and you will still be registered to vote.
NOTE: If the identification section is left blank and you do not check the boxes indicating you do not have identification, you will not be registered to vote."
The Affirmation:
"By completing and signing this Voter Registration Application, you are affirming the following information:
(a) You intend to claim the present address as your sole legal place of residence and, in so doing, abandon claim to any other legal residence.
(b) You are aware that, if you are a resident of this state for voting purposes, you are also a resident of this state for motor vehicle registration and operation purposes and for income tax purposes.
(c) You cannot legally vote in more than one place in any election.
(d) You are aware that a violation of the self-affirmation, of which you are about to make, is a criminal act under the laws of this state and you will be subject to the penalties provided by law.
WARNING: It is a crime to swear or affirm falsely as to your qualifications to register to vote."
http://www.elections.colorado.gov/WWW...
(Requires free registration.)
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