Act now to handle crush of new voters

Denver Post Editorial  23 September 2004

Colorado counties need to make sure they process thousands of new applications from citizens registering to vote this fall. It's critical to ensuring all votes will count.

Coloradans are answering democracy's call at a break-neck pace this year with some 30,000 registering to vote in just the past month.

That's wonderful news, but there's a whiff of controversy to come. We think it can and should be avoided, lest Colorado's provisional ballots become the 2004 version of Florida's hanging chads.

The crush of new voters has created a backlog of unprocessed voter registration forms at county clerks' offices across the state. Some 15,000 are waiting to be processed in Jefferson County; another 6,000 sit in Denver.

It's essential that all of the forms be processed expeditiously yet carefully. With close races expected across the ballot, there is no room to fudge this year. Counties are hiring part-time workers and asking staffers to work at night to process all of the forms before early voting starts Oct. 18.

Still, watchdog groups are worried that with the scramble to process all of the forms, mistakes could be made that later disenfranchise voters. (A group called Fair Vote Colorado will list the secretary of state's voter rolls as of Sept. 14 on its website Monday so Coloradans can see whether they've been properly registered. It can be found at www.fairvotecolorado.org

Mistakes could mean more people would have to vote with provisional ballots. A voter is given a provisional ballot if her name doesn't appear on precinct rolls or if there's some other identification problem. Such ballots are set aside and counted later if registration is verified.

There's another complication: If a voter is in the wrong precinct and chooses to vote there, only the vote for president will be counted, according to a rule written by Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson.

Common Cause has filed a lawsuit, which will be heard before a judge Tuesday morning, asking that Davidson rewrite the rule to allow counting of votes in as many races as possible.

For example, if a voter is in the wrong precinct, his vote for that precinct's legislative seat should not count. But his vote for U.S. Senate most certainly should count. And if he's in the correct congressional district, and state Senate district, and inside the right RTD district boundaries, then all of those votes should count, too.

Both major political parties and several non-partisan groups are making monumental pushes to get people registered to vote. Democrats have chipped away at the Republicans voter registration edge in Colorado, which now stands at 178,000, but they still rank third behind unaffiliated voters in terms of raw numbers.

Many of the gains are coming in under-represented populations, primarily Hispanics and young voters. Mannie Rodriguez with the Democratic National Committee in Colorado said about 16,500 Hispanics have registered to vote since March, most as Democrats.

In all, Colorado voter rolls have swelled by some 125,000 since this spring, he said. (About 2.8 million Coloradans were registered for the August primary.)

All votes must count come Nov. 2 - and the first step if for county clerks to complete the registration process.