No vote for parolees

Election bill amendments deserve defeat

Published March 8, 2007 at midnight

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What was supposed to be a technical bill cleaning up Colorado's election procedures has been snarled by floor amendments that make it worth defeating.

One change to Senate Bill 83 would allow parolees to vote; another would bar candidates who've lost one party's nomination from running as another party's nominee for the same office in the same election.

If they stay on the bill it should be defeated. SB 83 won preliminary passage in the Senate Tuesday, but final passage may be delayed until next week because a few members will be out of town until then.

True, good provisions would go down with the bad, but there's time to run another bill this year or even next, before the general election.

The provision that would allow parolees to vote was sponsored by Sen. Peter Groff, D-Denver. He argued that restoring their right to vote would make them less likely to violate parole and return to prison. It was approved on a party-line vote.

Whether parolees should vote is a close call, in our view. On balance, however, we stand with the current law, which was upheld by the Colorado Supreme Court as recently as last year.

The Colorado Constitution states, "No person while confined in any public prison shall be entitled to vote," but everyone released by a pardon or who has served his full term "shall without further action, be invested with all the rights of citizenship."

A clarifying statute says no person "serving a sentence of parole" shall be eligible to register or to vote.

The high court upheld the law when it was challenged by a parolee. "A person who is serving a sentence of parole has not served his or her full term of imprisonment within the meaning of this constitutional provision," it wrote.

That makes sense to us. By the way, Colorado stands with 34 other states in holding to this standard, according to Marc Mauer of The Sentencing Project in Washington.

Only 13 states allow someone to vote as soon as he's been paroled and two - Vermont and Maine - permit felons to vote even when incarcerated.

The so-called "Lieberman amendment," proposed by bill sponsor Ron Tupa of Boulder, would prohibit someone who has lost a party's nomination to win the nod of another party for the same office in the same election. In Connecticut last year, Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman was denied his party's renomination but won election running as an independent.

Tupa's amendment passed despite the opposition of Sen. Bob Hagedorn, D-Aurora, who thinks it's a power play by the major parties to forestall defections and uppity third parties. Lieberman isn't the only major politician to win re-election despite his party's rejection, he noted. In 1969, Republican Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York City lost his party's renomination but ran as the Liberal Party nominee and won a second term.

Hagedorn's thesis is that if the voters want a candidate, he or she shouldn't be thwarted by obstacles thrown up by vindictive major parties.

The bill also contains a troubling provision regarding public access to election records, but we understand that it may be fixed with a third-reading amendment. If not, that would be yet another reason to defeat this bill.

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