Colorado Voter Registration Study Questioned during House Administration Committee Hearing
Washington, DC(April 1, 2011): During a hearing convened by the Committee on House Administration yesterday, a report issued by the Office of Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler was the subject of tremendous scrutiny. The report, prepared with official state resources, makes unfounded allegations of non-citizens registering to vote and participating in the 2010 Election in Colorado. In a statement issued today, Rep. Charles Gonzalez, D-TX, questioned Mr. Gessler's judgment in preparing and releasing such a flawed report:
"No attorney would go before a judge with a report in which the main claims are preceded by such terms as ‘inconclusive', ‘incomplete', and ‘impossible to provide a precise number'. I was surprised to see Sec. Gessler base claims about who may have voted in November 2010 on immigration status reports from five years ago," said Rep. Gonzalez. "Ensuring the integrity of our elections is far too important a matter to base decisions on a study that mischaracterizes empirical data, neglects even the most obvious analysis of that data, and hides these failings behind terms like ‘tentative' and ‘preliminary.' The people of Colorado and the United States House of Representatives deserve better."
Rep. Gonzalez also questioned the lack of cooperation and information sharing between Secretary Gessler's office and local election officials in Colorado. He pointed to a press release issued by Mesa County Colorado Clerk and Recorder Sheila Reiner outlining her unsuccessful attempts to secure cooperation from Secretary Gessler's office in vitiating his claims.
(Excerpted from Reiner Release – full version).
"It seems premature to make this kind of statement without having fully investigated the issue. It would take the involvement of County Clerks to review voter records and contact our voters to determine whether or not they have become citizens and are or are not properly registered," said Reiner. County Clerks are statutorily required to facilitate the voter registration and election process. I take pride in my office and our work. It troubles me that the Clerks were not consulted in this data comparison."
Despite his claims of wide-spread voter fraud, Secretary Gessler's report acknowledges that his "data are incomplete and this number does not prove" that non-citizens registered improperly, let alone that they voted before becoming citizens. The Gessler report, instead, merely compares the number of people who were non-citizens when they, legally, acquired drivers licenses, to the list of people who voted in 2010.
"At today's hearing, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and Citrus County (FL) Supervisor of Elections Susan Gill both laid out legitimate problems in our voter registration processes and ways to ensure that only those eligible to vote are registered," said Gonzalez. "It is counterproductive to expend our limited resources on an incomplete, misleading collation of data when we could be analyzing the real problems we're facing."
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Kyle D. Anderson
Communications Director
Committee on House Administration - Democratic Staff
United States House of Representatives
1309 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-6157
Office: 202.225.2061