Boulder: Where the only laws that matter are the ones made in the drum circle.
There are 35,782 active Republicans in Boulder County, but according to a new story from The Daily Camera Boulder County officials couldn’t find even 100 Republicans to be election judges. Boulder County says they have 78 Republicans who are election judges right now, but seeing how at least one of those “Republicans” was a registered Democrat as recently as October 10th, how many of those 78 are actually Republicans is hard to say. As The Camera writes:
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office is investigating the makeup of Boulder County’s election judge teams after allegations that county officials stacked the ranks of mail-in ballot watchers with Democrats, including some posing as Republicans.
…Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Staiert confirmed Tuesday night that state election officials visited the Boulder clerk’s office and found some troubling inconsistencies with some election judges.
“One of them was a Democrat who had changed party affiliation on Oct. 10, so we are concerned that Boulder didn’t follow the list, then resorted to advertising for these positions,” said Staiert, a member of Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s staff. [the Peak’s emphasis]
What makes this whole scenario that much more unseemly is the fact that Colorado law allows unaffiliated voters and even voters from just one party to be election judges if the county made a fair effort in trying to fill those spots with the proper bipartisan teams. Which begs the question, if Boulder County officials had nothing to hide, why go through the charade of having election judges switch the affiliation of their party?
One of the main roles of election judges is to verify voter signatures on ballots match the voter signatures on voter registrations to prevent anyone from voting a ballot that isn’t theirs. Normally, one Republican and one Democrat would come together to agree that the two signatures matched or that they didn’t matched. When a ballot has a signature that doesn’t match, it’s pulled out for further review. Yet, this very important safeguard seems to be lacking in Boulder. As The Camera writes:
[Boulder County GOP Chairwoman Ellyn] Hilliard said that when she visited the clerk’s office this week to observe the mail ballot verification process, she did not recognize many of the election judges who county officials claimed represented the Republican party in the bipartisan process. She said several appeared to be Democrats with Republican nametags.
She said she also saw judges approving signatures that, from her perspective, were clearly not those of the voters to whom those ballots were issued. [the Peak’s emphasis]
With Boulder County having a 2 to 1 Democrat to Republican voter registration ratio, it only makes sense that the liberal-dominated Boulder County officials would want to let through as many ballots as possible since odds are that any random ballot is most likely pro-Democrat. Remember, it was Boulder County that first defied Colorado state law and started issuing gay marriage licenses before they were legally able to do so. Such a self-righteous streak of “I know what is best for everybody so I can ignore whatever laws get in my way” is the exact attitude one would need to commit voter fraud in the name of getting your chosen candidate elected. Just down the road from Boulder all sorts of screwy things went on with last year’s anti-fracking initiatives.
Clearly, Boulder has demonstrated it can’t be trusted to run fair elections. Someone needs to get up there to ensure fair elections are taking place.