The battle continues between a Colorado election clerk and the secretary of state over who can receive mail ballots before the Nov. 1 election. Today, Colorado Common Cause, a nonprofit advocacy group, filed to intervene in a lawsuit between Secretary of State Scott Gessler and the Denver county clerk.
“Denver is doing the right thing and Scott Gessler should not be able to stop Clerk Debra Johnson from sending ballots to legally registered voters,” said Jenny Flanagan, executive
director of Colorado Common Cause in a statement today.
Gessler claims that sending ballots to voters who did not participate in the last general election violates the law because he deems them “inactive.” He is suing Johnson to prevent the distribution of mail ballots in primarily Latino areas in Denver before the November election.
“Inactive voters are not ineligible to vote. As the Denver Post has pointed out, they are not electors ‘whose identity, address or eligibility to vote are at issue,'” editorialized the Durango Herald on Monday. “They are simply people who, for whatever reason, did not cast a ballot in 2010. They could have been hospitalized or on vacation. They could have perceived no significant differences between the candidates and no reason to vote on the ballot questions. Their ballots could have been lost in the mail.”
Common Cause says that “Gessler’s actions would violate the free speech and equal protection guaranteed in the First and Fourteenth amendments.”
“If the Common Cause motion is granted, the organization will participate in Friday’s hearing for a preliminary injunction in Denver District Court at 1:00 p.m.,” according to their statement today.
Learn more at Common Cause’s Web site here.