State of CO

The Denver Post endorsed Mark Udall for Senate over the weekend, which comes as good news for the embattled but leading Udall campaign. I must admit that after I read the Musgrave endorsement last week I was not certain how the Post would break. I'm glad to see reason and responsibility trump whatever blind insanity prompted them to herald Musgrave along on her quest for a fourth congressional term.

In other news from CO, Secretary of State Mike Coffman has thrown out over 6,000 new voter registration applications, citing them as incomplete because registrants who provided social security numbers did not also check the box indicating that they have no driver's license or state ID. This on the heels of Colorado's citation last week in the New York Times for illegally removing registered voters from voter lists within 90 days of the election. Reading Coffman's account of how he came to design the current registration form pretty well reveals the planned sabotage inherent in the process. As if back in 2006 state GOP leaders got together to figure out how to make certain that forms would be invalidated.

I have to say, unfortunately, that from my view as a canvasser this almost certainly nullifies a majority of the new registrations I helped eligible voters complete, since the last four of a social security number was much more popular than the registrant's license number. Much to GOP glee, I'm sure, no voter registration drive organizer ever pointed the box out to me in advance of a registration effort. I was not aware that a check mark in the box was mandatory, and never passed that info along to a single registrant. It seems logical to me that if the options are a CO driver's license OR a CO state ID OR a social security number, then there's no problem simply choosing the one the applicant wants to use. Logic, however, as we said down in Mexico, can get you killed. Alas, I fell into the trap.

My question, since Coffman is also running for Congress in Colorado's 6th district, is how the hell is all this not a huge conflict of interest? He's also the guy, by the by, who resolved the investigation into CO voting machines by authorizing their use for 2008 without any changes to the machines themselves, after himself acknowledging that problems with the machines plagued the 2006 elections and cost Coloradans votes. Arggggh. It's garbage politics like this that prompted me to muse, two weeks ago, on the need for a landslide victory for Obama just to keep the results close.

On a separate note, blogging is likely to be quite light in coming weeks as I work under a looming deadline. Thanks for reading, and please do check back as I'm sure I'll become so enraged by what I read at some point that I'll have to mash some words online just to figure out how I feel about a thing.