Colorado election chief Jena Griswold failed to block a lawsuit challenging her office’s signature verification system that a veteran’s organization claims is disenfranchising voters.
The Secretary of State’s office tried to dismiss the lawsuit in a Denver District Court claiming the Vet Voice Foundation didn’t have standing, but the judge shot down Griswold’s objection.
The point of the verification system was to prevent fraud, but it turns out that while thousands of ballots were being rejected, there was little effort to actually ferret out fraud.
A CPR News investigation in 2020 found that over about a four-year period more than 100,000 votes were rejected for signature mismatch, yet criminal cases of voter fraud were rare. Some counties and some demographic groups had significantly higher rates of rejection than others.
The lawsuit claims Griswold’s office is rejecting a significantly higher rate of Black and Hispanic signatures than for white voters.
Griswold a racist? How could that be? After all, she’s a Democrat. And a very partisan one, to boot.
In court filings, the plaintiff’s attorneys, from the national firm Perkins Coie, wrote that the right to vote is fundamental to democracy, but “for the vast majority of Colorado voters who vote by mail, this fundamental right is contingent on an arbitrary, deeply flawed signature matching process. While ostensibly deployed to verify voter identity, signature matching is election integrity theater: it disenfranchises qualified voters by the tens of thousands, all for the appearance—but not the reality—of election integrity.”
Wow. Colorado’s gold standard might not be so golden, after all.
We applaud the judge for siding against Griswold’s attempts to dismiss the case.
Allegations of voter ballots being dismissed at such alarming rates without any real attempt to pursue whether fraud is being committed, or the signature verification system is flawed, should be taken seriously.