October 06, 2012 04:07 PM UTC

Gessler's speech to conservatives is yet another warning to reporters about his brazen partisanship

• 6 Comments
• by: Jason Salzman

(While the fox guards the chickens, real mischief is done.   – promoted by ClubTwitty)

POLS UPDATE: Watch Scott Gessler’s CPAC speech in its entirety:

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The Denver Post ran a good piece yesterday morning, and the Colorado Indpendent followed with a  more expansive article yesterday afteroon, on Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s appearance at the Conservative Political Action Committee’s conference, held in Denver Thursday.

Gessler was on a panel titled, “Stealing Elections: What the Left Doesn’t Want You to Know About Voter Fraud,” and the media outlets reported, among other things, Gessler’s accusation that the “left” doesn’t care about election fraud.

Gessler’s comments, especially when you read his entire speech below, should be seen as yet another warning sign to reporters about his brazen partisanship, which should obviously be a huge concern for all journalists with the election coming.

Gessler came to the podium after a speech by Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote. (The Colorado Independent provided its own transcript of the speech as well.)

Gessler: Thank you, very much.  Let me start off by of course welcoming CPAC back to the great state of Colorado.  Some of us would say, “The Greatest of States” Colorado.  Um, you know, so I was elected back in November of 2010, took office in January of 2011.  And I think most people would agree that when it comes to elections, it should be easy to vote but tough to cheat.  And, you know, I’m focused on both efforts.  But the “tough to cheat” tends to draw a little bit of controversy.  And I think you’re going to hear from some folks who have really great examples of the vulnerabilities and problems we have throughout our country.

But what I was really struck by after taking office is the level of anger and the level of intensity with which the Left opposes efforts to make sure we’ve got clean and accurate voter rolls and honest elections.  And I’ve thought a lot about that -to think about what drives them.  And, so, I guess the topic here is, you know,  “What the Left Doesn’t Want You to Know”.  That’s hard to answer because they’re just so obvious in their behavior.  Uh, but I think that one of the things that’s going on, is the people who oppose election integrity efforts, they frankly don’t care about vote fraud.  They really don’t care about it.  They may say they do, but they don’t.

And when you argue with them, or when the public debate – and this is sort of how the public debate goes.  The Left will argue there is no vote fraud, there really isn’t any vote fraud.

They’ll say there’s corruption in our ballot initiatives.  They’ll say there’s corruption in campaign finance.  But when it comes to voting in the booths, our hearts are pure and without malice, and ne’er shall a dark thought cross our minds.

That’s their attitude.  And so you show them that there’s fraud and mistake and abuse there, and then they change their argument.  They say, “Well, there’s just a little bit.  You haven’t shown me very much.  It’s just a little bit.”  And so you may show them a few more, and there’s more, and then they say, “Well, it’s not organized.”  As if organization is the hallmark.  And so, sometimes we’ll actually be able to show organization and then they’ll say, “Well, it hasn’t affected an election.  You can’t prove to me that it has affected an election.”  There’s examples where it has affected an election.  And then they’ll argue, “Well, it’s not widespread.”  And of course, for them, widespread is never widespread enough when it comes to vote fraud.  It’s always minimal.  And then, after you pin them down on that argument, they’ll say, “Well, let’s focus on getting people to vote.  Because that’s really what America’s about.”  And the reason why I’ve become so confident that they don’t care about this is, when you look at Colorado, we’ve made efforts to clean our voting rolls.  We’ve also made massive efforts to register people to vote.  Actually, those efforts have outweighed, from a resource standpoint, um, the non-citizen and voter ID issues.  But the Left doesn’t care about that. They’re only focused on denying that vote fraud exists.  It’s unfortunate.  I think the other thing that’s going on is people on the left, to be frank among us and others, are manipulative.  They just manipulate this issue.  And I think – I mean, I think some people are very sincere when they deny vote fraud or – they’re misguided, but sincere.  But I see two ways in which they really manipulate it.  One is, when it comes to illegally registering people to vote.  Voter registration drives don’t suffer the consequences.  They’ll go before people – for example, non-citizens, they don’t care if they are non-citizens.  They’ll register them to vote.  And if that non-citizen registers and then votes, they suffer serious consequences:  criminal prosecution, loss of the ability to ever become a US citizen.  But the voter registration drive doesn’t suffer any of those consequences.  So I think they’re very happy to manipulate people into believing that it’s okay to ignore these laws.  I think the other thing that they are willing to do, is manipulate people to demagogue an issue, to sort of try and rile up anger, or use anger as a tool.  And that’s happened throughout our history.  But to sort of manipulate people to get them angry against a make-believe enemy that doesn’t exist, in an effort to win votes, to demonize, frankly, people who are conservative and believe in limited government.  This is the tool they use, and of course the ultimate card they play is the racism card.  And they’re more than willing to lie to do this.  We’ve done some investigation in some of our voter registration drives, and one person was lying, telling people they were no longer registered to vote.  And when that person was confronted, they got very angry.  They said, “It doesn’t matter what I say, as long as I’m trying to register people to vote and get people mobilized.”  In other words, “It’s okay to demagogue an issue,” this person thought, as long as their end is pure-their – the means justify the ends, [inaudible –in that sense (?)].  And so we’ve seen that repeatedly.  It’s an unfortunate dynamic.  I think the ‘take-away’ from all of this is, the people who oppose election integrity on the left, they’re never going to change their minds.  They really sort of dug their heels in.  But the broad mass of people in America are common sense, and they agree with us.  And so, I think we have to remain steadfast in our efforts, through solid evidence, persuasion, and patience, and ultimately, ultimately we will prevail in this battle. And thank you for being here.  And thank you for all you do.