Politics

Colorado recall elections risk becoming a ‘free-for-all’ under new Dem-sponsored election law

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Greg Campbell Contributor
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In yet another twist in the recall elections against gun control-supporting Democrats, it appears that anyone in the state of Colorado can vote on whether Senate President John Morse and Sen. Angela Giron get the boot or stay in office.

The quirk is a result of a new election law passed during the same contentious Democratic-controlled legislative session that produced the gun control bills — and in an additional bit of irony, Giron sponsored it in the state senate.

Whether it will ultimately hurt her or help her remains to be seen.

As reported by the Colorado Observer, the strict wording of the law can be interpreted to mean that anyone who has lived anywhere in Colorado for at least 22 days prior to the Sept. 10 recall elections can register to vote in Morse’s and Giron’s districts, all the way up until the day of the election, whether they live in those districts or not.

All that’s required under the new law is for prospective voters to tell election staff that they intend to move to those districts in the future. Those voters don’t actually have to  — state officials have no way of following up on such promises.

“Without further clarification from the Secretary of State’s rulemaking, I don’t believe any law would be broken,” Douglas County Clerk and Recorder Jack Arrowsmith told the Observer.

Arrowsmith’s office is not involved in the recall elections.

The Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act was meant to make it easier to vote, but Republicans said it would open the door to voter fraud. Secretary of State Scott Gessler said he wasn’t consulted on the bill, even though his office would be in charge of enforcing it.

“The sponsors are clearly clueless about how this bill works,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation in April.

Gessler’s office is currently drafting rules to clarify some of the new law’s points, but those rules won’t be adopted in time to affect the recall elections.

“As a result,” Colorado Observer reporter Valerie Richardson writes, “it’s not hard to envision a situation in which the election turns into a statewide free-for-all, with Democrats busing in anti-recall voters from Denver and Boulder while Republicans truck in pro-recall voters from Parker and Greeley.”

Wayne Williams, the Republican El Paso County clerk and recorder who will be running the recall election against Morse, predicted almost this exact scenario in an opinion piece for the Denver Post in May.

“It allows people to vote in counties in which they have never lived,” he wrote. “In a misguided attempt to ‘modernize’ our election system, proponents of this legislation are taking us back to the corruption of 19th century Tammany Hall.”

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