Mailing out ballots to inactive voters is an open invitation to voter fraud. There’s no telling who’s going to receive and submit the ballot.
Therefore, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler sensibly told Denver and Pueblo Counties that they should follow Colorado law and not mail ballots to inactive voters.
In response to Gessler’s protection of voting integrity, the left has waged a full-scale smear campaign against him, accusing him of racism and disenfranchisement. This is a major leftist strategy for the 2012 elections: smear all Republicans, conservatives, Tea Partiers, and free-market activists as racists, in order to raise sympathy support for Obama. It is a nasty, mean-spirited, intellectually dishonest tactic. If you want to understand why the left does this, read the article I coauthored on Saul Alinsky and Obama.
One basic issue is how an “inactive” voter can become “reactivated.” It turns out it’s trivially easy.
I called Andrew Cole about this; he is a spokesman for Gessler’s office.(Michael Sandoval has also written a bit about this issue.)
Cole said, “To become inactive, you have to have missed a general election, not responded to at least one follow-up postcard from your county clerk, and not voted in any subsequent elections such as a municipal election.”
So how does an inactive voter reactivate? Cole explained, “You can physically visit your clerk’s office, you can go to GoVoteColorado.com and with a state ID card activate your status online, and you could also write a letter to your clerk, but you’d have to have a signature to verify who you were.”
In addition, a previously inactive voter can get a ballot from the clerk directly “up until and including election day.”
So this is pretty simple: if you have not voted in a recent election, and if you have not bothered to reply to your clerk’s postcard, you can easily reactivate yourself online or by visiting or writing your clerk. Surely that’s not too much to ask of those determining the future of the free world.
While he was on the phone, I also asked Cole about the controversy surrounding military voters.
Cole said that issue arose in Pueblo County under clerk Bo Ortiz. Cole said Ortiz asked the Secretary of State’s office about the matter only this week.
According to Cole, Gessler’s office told Ortiz that he “can’t mail ballots to inactive voters.” However, he “should have resolved this issue weeks ago.” Cole said there are 80 inactive military voters listed in Pueblo County, and Ortiz has email contacts for 64 of them. In Cole’s words, Gessler’s office told Ortiz’s office this week, “You should immediately email all 64” with known emails and send postcards to the rest. Moreover, Ortiz “should have done that weeks ago.”
Cole summarized, “We’re asking Peublo County to follow the law, just like we’re asking Denver to follow the law.”
Apparently following the law is not a concept the left easily wraps its collective head around. Instead, the left would rather play the politics of smear and character assassination.