NO on SB 234 -- Junk mail ballots

Colorado Legislators: Please Vote NO on SB 234.

This bill would compromise our entire election system and must be defeated.

As you may recall, in 2002, the people spent an entire year working to defeat Amendment 28, the Mandatory Mail Ballot Election amendment. The amendment was resoundingly defeated by 63 of 64 Colorado counties – 60 percent of the votes cast said “NO”. Every Colorado County voted "no", with the single exception of La Plata County.

The Rocky Mountain News as well as many other papers opposed the amendment then, and just a few days ago, on April 24, Vince Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News wrote:

“Ballot ballet
Once again I’ve cast more than a single ballot in a local election. And once again it’s given me an uneasy feeling about the integrity of mail elections.

On Monday I dropped off three ballots at the Wellington Webb building in downtown Denver. It’s legal to mail or deliver a ballot that isn’t yours, of course, although you have to sign in and record the number you produce in person.

But how would they know how many ballots I’d dumped in a trash bin out back?

What if I’d promised to deliver a dozen ballots from a nursing home where a relative of mine resided — saving each voter the escalating postage — and then quietly discarded those I suspected disagreed with my own electoral choices?

There are simply too many points at which a mail ballot may be in the control of someone other than the voter or the office tabulating the results. And one of these days we’ll discover that it matters.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com .”

Our welcome screen highlights some of the problems – see www.users.qwest.net/~alkolwicz/welcome.htm

Supporters of junk mail ballots hope to exploit the opportunity created when thousands of ballots are retrieved by unknown recipients. They’ll argue that the voter asked for the ballot. But we all know that voter registration data is never current, and that we live in a mobile society.

SB 234 is attempting to resurrect this bad idea using a device called the “permanent absentee ballot”. WE can prove that the approach is not secure, does not yield accurate results, and disenfranchises voters. This bill will re-open the opportunity for massive error and vote fraud that we fought so hard to successfully defeat.

Please do everything you can to stop this affront against the people of Colorado.

Please Vote NO on SB 234. And please help us to reach other Representatives and convince them that SB 234 is a terrible idea that has already been rejected by the voters.