September 26, 2012 12:51 AM UTC

Scott Gessler Hurting Small Businesses

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• by: vertigo700

(Priorities.  Some edits for typos and front-paging. – promoted by ClubTwitty)

I am one of four employees at a small business in Denver. I won’t say which one but we are definitely what you think when you think of a small business. We’re an independent, bricks-and-mortar store (though we do online sales as well) that has been in the community for decades.

Scott Gessler’s office at the Secretary of State is hurting our business.

As many of you know, one of the primary responsibilities of the Colorado Secretary of State is to register local businesses. In every other year, we have gotten a small postcard that reminds us when we need to re-register our business with the office.  This needs to be done every year and usually happens in spring.

This year they decided not to send those postcards to Colorado businesses and instead send reminders exclusively by e-mail. Since we’re a business that gets lots of random business spam, we have set up pretty restrictive spam filters.

So of course

“entity.subscribe@sos.state.co.us” with attachments goes straight to our spam filter. Back in May.

The state requires businesses to re-register by July 31 every year. The first reminder apparently came in May. The second? Three days ago when they told us we we’re now “non-compliant” in re-registering our business in an e-mail that went through our spam filter and we only saw by happenstance (We do regularly check our spam folder but a “entity-subscribe” e-mail with does not stand out as being important).

Normally it only costs $10 to register the business. This year it’s costing us $50 because we were late. If we hadn’t seen this e-mail and we waited until after October, we would have basically been delinquent and would have to register the business as if it was the first time ever, something that costs hundred of dollars.

I am not writing this diary to complain about our situation. It sucks but we figured it out in time. What annoys me is the things Scott Gessler is doing with his office that have nothing to do with his primary responsibilities. How much did it cost Gessler and Colorado taxpayers to send the thousands of letters to potentially “non-eligible” voters? How much money is he spending to take county-clerks to court to prevent them from sending mail ballots to eligible voters?

I thought Republicans were supposed to be business-friendly? Yet instead of helping businesses, Gessler is waging battles against voting rights. If that isn’t misplaced priorities, I don’t know what is.