May 15, 2007 04:52 PM UTC

Denver Post Repeats Weak Blog Hit on Candidate

• 4 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

We’re not going to spend much time on this, because we don’t really care, but it’s an interesting case of blog-hype manipulating the news–a subject that, even when we don’t think it’s justified, remains close to our hearts.

As the Denver Post reports:

A Denver City Council candidate linked to three addresses in the past 10 months dismissed allegations Monday that he does not meet a 12-month residency requirement for the seat.

Last week the Denver Election Commission asked Paul Lopez for extra residency documentation. And on Monday former City Councilman Richard “Rick” Taylor sent a letter to the commission asking if Lopez was a resident of District 3 for the required one year before the May 1 election…

For those of you who don’t know, because this article doesn’t tell you, the allegation that Paul Lopez may not be a qualifying resident of the district he’s running in comes from a couple of relatively new “Denver politics blogs,” whose postings on the subject were then promoted widely in comments to other blogs (including this one).

While there’s enough complexity in this allegation to incite plenty of fevered rumors–further complicated by Denver’s apparently shaky definition of “residency”–there’s one simple bottom line if you bother to read the whole article:

Lopez’s campaign manager, Gia Irlando, said the election commission asked for more proof of residency as recently as last week. The campaign supplied 14 pages of bills, college financial statements and IRS statements with the District 3 address.

Election commission spokesman Alton Dillard said Lopez’s residence was first checked against information on hand prior to May 1.

“The person in question signed an affidavit stating that they met all the requirements to run for the office,” Dillard said. “We double-checked that information against the voter-registration database.”

Which would seem to indicate “case closed” to us. Furthermore, the results of the Denver election that forced this runoff (Lopez 46%, opponent JoAnn Phillips 15%) don’t appear to give Mr. Lopez much to worry about–though we can certainly understand why Phillips supporters would try to make maximum hay over anything they can find.

We don’t think this is much of a story, but then again we aren’t the ones trying to fill the Post with copy every morning now that Jeri Clausing is gone…