Are Colorado election laws woke enough for baseball bosses?

Colorado Democrats are pitching Denver as a replacement city for Major League Baseball’s All-Star game after the league pulled this summer’s game from Atlanta to protest Georgia’s new law expanding voter access.

The effort got off to a rocky start when U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet embarrassed himself by tweeting, then promptly deleting an appeal to baseball bosses falsely claiming Colorado had the highest voter turnout among states with a league team.

But more importantly, one has to wonder whether Colorado’s mail ballot signature verification laws are really woke enough for corporate Democrats pretending to be concerned about restricting access to the ballot box.

Over the last several years, Georgia Democrats and “Governor” Stacey Abrams have strenuously opposed virtually all efforts to strengthen absentee ballot standards, and argued it was racist to require voters show an ID card when requesting their ballot.

Karl Rove recently observed in the Wall Street Journal that Democrats’ outrage over Georgia’s rules is entirely hypocritical when compared to laws in other states, including Colorado.

Democrats are particularly upset with requiring Georgians voting by mail to provide the number from their driver’s license, free state-provided ID or other generally accepted identification. […]

 

Ms. Abrams and her allies also oppose efforts to toughen signature verification requirements for mail-in ballots. But what about Colorado? The increasingly blue Mile High State has what’s likely the toughest such procedures in the country, which is important since it conducts elections primarily by mail.

 

Last fall, roughly 1 of every 112 ballots—29,000 altogether—was rejected because the signature didn’t match the one on file with election officials. This was after voters were allowed to “cure” problems by responding to a text asking for a copy of—you guessed it—their driver’s license or other photo I.D. bearing their signature. More than 11,000 did so. When will Colorado’s Democratic governor and legislature be branded vote suppressors?

If Democrats really want to make Colorado woke enough to watch a baseball game, they’ll have to change the law to weaken voter laws to make it easier to cheat and appropriate someone else’s ballot.

This entire manufactured controversy is simply partisan theater, and as National Review pointed out, Major League Baseball doesn’t even know why they object to the law.

If MLB is suddenly passionate about the intricacies of the nation’s voting laws, it could have provided one specific alleged outrage in Georgia that caused it to make this move. Was it the newly extended voting hours? The decision to keep drop boxes permanently after their adoption on an emergency basis last year, only not at permanent pandemic levels? The requirement that voters write a driver’s license number or other identifier on absentee-ballot envelopes (when Ohio, the state where the last All-Star Game was played, has a similar rule)? The prohibition on people giving water within 150 feet of a polling station to people standing in line, although drinks can be given to poll workers to distribute and water stations made generally available? […]

 

Certainly there is no consistency here. MLB had no problem a few years ago forging an agreement with the Chinese tech company, Tencent, to stream its games in China, where early-voting hours are famously restrictive. It’s been happy to have a cooperative relationship with Cuba, where ballot drop boxes are not nearly as available as one would hope. It allows the Yankees and Mets to play in New York, and makes its headquarters there, when New York doesn’t have no-excuse absentee voting and Georgia does, it offers fewer days of early voting than Georgia, and it has its own law against giving food and drink to voters.