Voter Purge Rejected in Colorado

By GottaLaff

First Michigan, now Colorado. This is excellent news!

Tens of thousands of Coloradans who had been removed from the state’s voter rolls will be allowed to vote in next week’s election and given extra protections so their ballots are counted, under an agreement reached late Wednesday in federal court here.

The voters’ names had been removed by Mike Coffman, the Colorado secretary of state, who said he did so because the voters had moved out of state or were listed more than once on the rolls. But Mr. Coffman was sued by a coalition of voting rights and other groups who said such purges were generally prohibited by federal law within 90 days of an election.

Provisional ballots? Hmm. I'm having doubts now. The experts don't think much of provisional ballots:

Under the agreement, voters removed from the rolls will be permitted to cast provisional ballots, and those ballots will be counted unless election officials can prove the voters were not eligible. To strike such ballots, county election officials must conduct an extensive records review on each one, a decision that must then be reviewed by Mr. Coffman’s office.

“This is unprecedented,” said Elizabeth Westfall, a lawyer for the Advancement Project, a civil rights group that helped file the lawsuit. “We are really thrilled that there will be this degree of unprecedented scrutiny and protection for these purged voters when they cast their provisional ballots.” [...]

Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and an authority on voting litigation nationwide, said the settlement was noteworthy because many states had put the onus on voters to prove that their provisional ballots were legitimate before they could be counted. The settlement shifts this responsibility to the state, Mr. Foley said, and is more in keeping with the spirit of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, which calls for election officials to count a provisional ballot if they can determine the voter’s eligibility.

Okay, that's a little better. The main thing is, our side won again.

There is always the nagging problem, however, that some voters will avoid going to the polls, because they've gotten wind of problems like these. I read that over at TPM ("And there's no way to measure the effect that even the unsuccessful ploys have in generating cynicism about the process itself, and thereby reducing turnout, to Republicans' advantage."), and it's one of those little thoughts that keep rolling around what's left of my mind.

But for now, I'm feeling a lot more optimistic than I was only a few days ago.