May 18, 2009 06:37 PM UTC

Secretary of State Candidate Hates Petition Fraud Reform

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Nothing you wouldn’t expect from longtime GOP and 527 attorney Scott Gessler, but it makes for one heck of a laugh track to his campaign for Secretary of State–as the Denver Post reports:

Gov. Bill Ritter signed a major bill aimed at reforming Colorado’s initiative petition process Friday, one week after a Republican secretary of state candidate made criticism of the bill a centerpiece of one of his first e-mails to supporters.

The bill – House Bill 1326 – clamps down on signature-gathering firms by prohibiting them from paying petition circulators by the signature and imposing a number of requirements designed to prevent fraud. The bill also creates a process by which people can have their signatures removed from a petition after signing.

The measure was sponsored by a bipartisan group of legislative leaders, including House Speaker Terrance Carroll, D-Denver, and new Senate President Brandon Shaffer, D-Longmont. House Minority Leader Mike May, R-Parker, and Senate Minority Leader Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction, also signed onto the bills as co-sponsors…

Republican election attorney Scott Gessler, a candidate for secretary of state, railed against the bill in a campaign e-mail he sent to supporters last week. He said the bill will “attract litigation like flies” and will cause proposed initiatives to be tied up in court.

“This is the most unfair, draconian rule designed to prevent Coloradan’s voice from being heard,” Gessler wrote.

Gessler pointed specifically to a provision in the bill that would allow a petition circulator’s signatures to be tossed out if the circulator doesn’t show up in court to challenge allegations of misconduct. Gessler criticized current Secretary of State Bernie Buescher – a Democrat who was appointed by Ritter and intends to run for election – for supporting the bill.

Carroll, though, said Gessler misrepresented provisions of the bill in making his criticisms and said attorneys who bring frivolous challenges to petitions could be sanctioned. He then took a shot at Gessler’s history as a political attorney…

Does it seem a little odd for Gessler to be up in arms about checking a petition’s validity after, say, what he did to Marc Holtzman’s petitions? Does it seem like an expedient time to ‘take a shot’ at Bob “What Trailhead Group?” Beauprez’s lawyer? For that matter, just about any time a Secretary of State candidate Gessler were to, well, say anything about election law, couldn’t somebody point to an incident in Gessler’s long partisan history? Either Gessler accusing somebody of breaking election law or (more often) defending somebody from the charge, always a matter of simple partisan expediency–that’s his job as attorney for the Colorado GOP, isn’t it?

The difference now, we suppose, is he’d like to go ahead and guard the henhouse too. Whatever Gessler meant to be the message in opposing this bipartisan, overwhelmingly supported bill, intended to mitigate serious voter deception problems that came to a head last year during the campaign for the duplicitously-named “Civil Rights Initiative,” his mercenary past kneecapped it.