On Monday, at the House State Affairs committee hearing on House Bill 1201, Denver Elections Director Amber McReynolds testified on behalf of the Colorado Clerk’s Association, through which she co-chairs the association’s Elections Statutes Review Committee.  House Bill 1201 would prescribe the relief that a court must order in elections once it has been established that illegal votes were cast.

In her testimony, McReynolds claimed that neither she nor her fellow clerks have a clear sense of what an illegal vote is.  Below is a snippet from her testimony in which she responds to a question posed by Democrat freshman Rep. Foote:

“I’m not sure, to be honest, what is an illegal vote. There isn’t a true definition of what an illegal vote is in Title 1…So when the Election Statute Review Committee looked at this, that was one of the biggest points that all the counties kept saying, what is an illegal vote? What does that mean?”

Fortunately, Rep. Tim Dore took to his blog to provide a common sense definition for McReynolds and Johnson:

“It is common practice and common sense, that illegal votes are votes cast by persons who are either not residence of the state, citizens, felons or not of voting age. Would seem simple enough, but guess not.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the Denver Clerk and Recorder’s office has obfuscated the voter fraud issue by claiming ignorance of vocab terms.  Last year, after Secretary of State Scott Gessler suggested that there had been voter fraud in Denver, Denver Clerk and Recorder Debra Johnson used the same ignorance of technical terms in attempts to discredit Gessler’s assertion:

“I’m not sure what he [Gessler] is saying is fraud. He’s using the word fraud loosely.”

Of course there’s no voter fraud in Denver or any other Colorado county – the Clerks Association doesn’t even know what an illegal vote is.  Seems pretty obvious to most Coloradans.