Election posturing

Postal Service should butt out of a Denver decision

Thursday, January 25, 2007

The run-up to Denver's Jan. 30 mail-ballot election on charter reform is starting to resemble a soap opera - or an episode of The Jerry Springer Show - and it's time for all those involved to do what's expected of them and grow up.

Consider the fax sent Friday by Dean Granholm, Colorado/Wyoming district manager of the U.S. Postal Service, to Secretary of State Mike Coffman. Granholm complained about the lack of communication the Postal Service has received from Denver prior to the special election, among other problems.

The letter stated that the Postal Service was given no advance notice by the Denver Election Commission of the special election, of the date 300,000-plus mail ballots had to be delivered, or of the design of the ballot packets until it was too late to make any changes.

Meantime, all contacts with the Postal Service were made by Denver's vendor, Sequoia Voting Systems, not by the commission or its staff.

Fair enough. By all accounts, the commission dropped the ball and expected Sequoia to handle logistical matters with minimal oversight.

Had the commission met with Granholm, it might have addressed head-on his complaint that as of Jan. 17, 17,600 ballots had been returned as undeliverable; that number now exceeds 30,000, commission spokesman Alton Dillard told us.

But here's the problem with Granholm's complaint: The current number of undeliverable ballots may not be out of line. When Denver conducted an all-mail election in 2003, 37,000 ballots were returned. People move and don't update their addresses. Happens all the time.

From our view, the communication breakdown offers voters an added incentive to approve Referred Charter Amendment 1A and replace the commission with an elected clerk and recorder, as we have long urged.

Not only was Granholm's message based on a faulty assumption, it was also petty and misguided. First of all, he directed his complaints to Coffman, who has no jurisdiction over purely local elections.

Granholm apparently neglected to notify the commission of his concerns. It reportedly did not know the letter existed until Monday, when Coffman's deputy William Hobbs forwarded a copy.

If the Postal Service has a problem with the Election Commission, you'd think Granholm would talk to the commissioners first. The secretary of state cannot supervise local elections, and Hobbs was wise to say as much in his note to the commission.

Even worse, Granholm then took a cheap shot at Sequoia, calling it a "low cost, low quality, out of state election mail vendor."

It's outrageous for a federal bureaucrat to attempt to meddle with decisions made by local government. Though in some quarters Sequoia is treated with the same disdain as Halliburton (and we've been highly critical of it ourselves), Denver's choice of election vendors is Denver's business. Granholm should butt out.

No one expected a picnic when the City Council authorized the special election late last year. Still, there's no justification for the Postal Service to get in a snit about it, when its biggest concern should be getting those ballots back to the commission by Tuesday.