Denver Post - With less than a month until Election Day, Colorado's registration rolls include as many as 6,000 felons who should be ineligible to vote.
Election officials have failed to prevent state prisoners and parolees from registering or casting ballots. Records show felons have voted as recently as the August primary, despite a law forbidding it.
Secretary of State Donetta Davidson said she was unaware of potential problems until she was asked about a Denver Post comparison of voter registrations to felons currently in the Department of Corrections system.
"Did I look at it when I took office? No. Could I have looked at it? Yes," said Davidson, a Republican, and Colorado's election chief since 1999. "I had no idea we had that type of numbers."
Davidson plans this week to convene an emergency meeting of clerks from Colorado's 64 counties to try to keep prisoners and parolees from voting in November.
I think the big question that needs to be asked is: Who is registering all of these felons? Voter registration groups are supposed to be aware of voter laws in the locations where they're registering voters. If these groups are registering large numbers of ineligible voters one has to wonder why they'd be wasting their time.
Could it be that this is a tactic? Could some of these voter advocacy groups be registering ineligible voters in order to cause confusion? They could also be setting themselves up to push more claims of "voter disenfranchisement" following the election. By registering ineligible voters they force the government to prevent these people from voting, something that can easily be spun into the government "disenfranchising voters."
I think some of these voter advocacy groups are in need of some very close scrutiny as to their motives and methods.
Update:
More support for my above call for scrutiny (via Evil White Guy in the comments).
DENVER - With just 21 days left until an election in which every vote will count, the 9News I-Team has uncovered voter registration fraud that could cause chaos on Election Day for hundreds, possibly thousands of Colorado voters.
9News has discovered a record number of fraudulent voter-registrations across the state. Secretary of State Donetta Davidson tells 9News she is concerned about what the I-Team has uncovered and wants those responsible prosecuted. "It has just gone rampant," she told reporter Deborah Sherman in an interview Monday afternoon.
Most of the fraud has come from registration drives, where people at grocery stores or on the streets ask you to sign up. 9News has learned many workers have re-registered voters multiple times by changing or making up information about them. 9News has documented 719 cases of potentially fraudulent forms at county election offices show fraudulent names, addresses, social security numbers or dates of birth in Denver, Douglas, Adams, Boulder and Lake counties. Information from other counties is still coming in.
The link above also has video with a couple people claiming to have registered to vote 20 or 30 times. And they're laughing about it.
I'm wondering if these voter registration groups aren't doing more harm than good. Getting people to vote is a good thing, but these groups seem to be trying to game the system. That's not right.
Update 2:
More (via ISOU):
(Oct. 12) -- Employees of a private voter registration company allege that hundreds, perhaps thousands of voters who may think they are registered will be rudely surprised on election day. The company claims hundreds of registration forms were thrown in the trash.
Anyone who has recently registered or re-registered to vote outside a mall or grocery store or even government building may be affected.
The I-Team has obtained information about an alleged widespread pattern of potential registration fraud aimed at democrats. Thee focus of the story is a private registration company called Voters Outreach of America, AKA America Votes.
The out-of-state firm has been in Las Vegas for the past few months, registering voters. It employed up to 300 part-time workers and collected hundreds of registrations per day, but former employees of the company say that Voters Outreach of America only wanted Republican registrations.
Two former workers say they personally witnessed company supervisors rip up and trash registration forms signed by Democrats.
Maybe its time to put a stop to third party organizations registering voters. I understand that some of these groups are completely above-board and are doing good work, but recent weeks have shown that many of the groups are partisan in nature and are doing more harm to the system than good.
What if we got rid of voter registration all together? Why not simply require voters to show an ID proving their status as a citizen and their home address before they vote? No ID, no vote. Computer systems could be setup so that felons and such could be stopped at the polls.
That's how we do it in North Dakota.