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November 22, 2013 01:33 PM UTC

Arapahoe DA Indicts Two Voters, Two Canvassers

  • 13 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Scott Gessler.
Scott Gessler.

As the Denver Post's Lynn Bartels reports, we finally have charges filed against someone–four people, in fact–as a result of Secretary of State Scott Gessler's three-year quest to uncover what he originally insisted was "thousands" of illegal voters in Colorado:

The Arapahoe County district attorney's office has charged four people with misdemeanors after a voter-fraud investigation that tracked more than 40 people and election records dating back to 2008.

Two of the people charged are immigrants — one from Africa who has donated to Democratic causes, the other from Poland — who have been deemed ineligible to vote in Colorado. The other two are Coloradans who worked for a liberal non-profit organization that registered people to vote.

All four are charged with "procuring false registration," according to a news release Friday from Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler's office. The office investigated 41 "non-citizens."

"This is evidence that this is not an epidemic, but there are isolated incidents that need to be treated seriously," Brauchler said.

9NEWS' Brandon Rittiman with reaction from Secretary of State Gessler:

Gessler defends his record saying that snuffing out any amount of voter fraud, however rare, is a goal that justifies his policies.

"I appreciate District Attorney Brauchler's good work," Gessler told 9NEWS. "This news further confirms that there is a vulnerability in the system and is more evidence from across the state showing that confusion and error allow non-citizens to register, and in some cases vote."

Bartels reports that Arapahoe County DA George Brauchler's office spent some 300 man-hours investigating the 41 names referred to his office by Gessler, in the end producing indictments against two improperly registered voters and two paid canvassers from 2008. Brauchler is quickly gaining a reputation as a partisan politician with higher aspirations, and in support of Gessler's dogmatic campaign to uncover noncitizen voters, we're sure he spared no expense. In the end, though, Brauchler's statement that there is "not an epidemic" of voter fraud is reasonable and accurate, and there's nothing inappropriate in his misdemeanor indictments.

Obviously, Democrats are going to nonetheless question such a massive effort to "uncover" an infinitesimal amount of actual trouble. Gessler's insistence that this result in Arapahoe County "confirms" a "vulnerability in the system" is simply laughable. In every meaningful way, the paltry results of Gessler's years-long campaign to root out what he originally insisted was ten thousand or more "illegal voters" speak for themselves, and prove there is no systemic problem with noncitizens voting. The problems uncovered here are anecdotal, not systemic, and in fact are much smaller in number than so many other ways a legal voter's ballot might be compromised, invalidated, folded, bent, spun, or mutilated. As one example, compare this effort to the troubled rollout of Gessler's mobile voter registration website, which "disappeared" the registrations of many hundreds of legal voters. Everybody wants as accurate an election as possible, but what camels were swallowed to strain these proverbial gnats?

It's been said that those who set out with a preconceived expectation usually find what they expect to. In Gessler's case, even when the facts totally fail to support his expectations, he recites the same talking points.

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13 thoughts on “Arapahoe DA Indicts Two Voters, Two Canvassers”

  1. OK!

    Now, if the scottster follows up with El Paso County DA Jaime Esparza filing criminal charges on jonthecon caldera voting illegally (No matter he turned in a blank ballot, he filed and used a ballot as a resident of a County where he had no intention of moving to), I'll be totally behind gessler's "war on voter fraud".

    scotty's next move must be to pressure Jefferson County DA Scott Story into filing charges on recall dirtbag mike Mcalpine for attempting to use someone else's address in SD19 in order to sign the recall petion re: Senator Hudak.

    The exact number of phony signatures and signatures of pantloads not living in but claiming to be residents of SD19 is unknown right now, but I suspect the total is well above 30% of the total signatures.

    The paid out of town mercenaries that are the kennedy staffers are under immense pressure to sign anybody and everybody, and as a result the totals are scewed heavily with illegal signatures.

    Do your job scotty. 

  2. Grassroots voter outreach (hired the two canvassers) is one of the shadier outfits in the canvassing/petition signing business. It's the only one in Colorado on the Ripoff report.

    Rocky Mtn Voter Outreach is better, and no, they haven't been hired by either of the pro-Hudak committees as of October filings.

    In 2005,  because of abuses,  Colorado's statutes that apply to voter registration were changed to ensure that no one gets paid per registration for voter registration anymore, which cut down on fraud tremendously.  VRD registrants can still get paid, but only by the hour regardless of how many voters they register.

  3. Aurora Sentinel's editor summarizes for the rest of us:

    Nesty business — Arapahoe DA’s voter fraud chickens come home to roost

    Are you freaking kidding me? Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler pushed to spend about $11,000 worth of critically valuable lawyer time on reeling in two poor immigrants who may or may not have fudged their voter status.

    Are we so short on real crime and criminals here in Aurora that the local DA has to stir this kind of crap up to fill the hours in a day?

    Worth a click to read the whole thing.

    1. Not to mention Brauchler's multi-year, multi-million dollar ego trip seeking the death penalty for the theater shooter who shall not be named.

      Accepting a guilty plea with no chance of parole wasn't good enough for King George.

  5. I have an exercise for Scott Gessler: do an after-action review of the process he's gone through in order to reach this point. He started with an accusation that there were more than 10,000 illegal voters in this state. He then produced a vastly inaccurate list which was shot down by the various clerks and DAs to whom he referred people for investigation. He's wasted untold thousands of government employee hours in order to prove his worth to the GOP – bringing the horrible realities of our broken voting system to the attention of the masses in order to prove that Republicans were looking out for Joe Six-Pack.

    Well – Joe Six-Pack is, we are told, concerned about the waste of his hard-earned money in government boondoggles. It's time for some open, honest modern-day management techniques: publish an after-action review that dwells on what could have been done better in order to save some of the wasted resources.

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