Johnson: Image of illegals voting is just bugaboo

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published June 30, 2006 at midnight

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So the legislature has been called back for a special session to do something about illegal immigration. Goodness. November and the election will not get here soon enough.

I suppose, given the predictable political posturing and overheated speechifying and name-calling that will go on, it's a pretty dumb idea to cross our collective fingers and hope something meaningful emerges from it all.

But, hey, it's still OK to dream.

And, face it, it just is no longer sporting to vilify Gov. Bill Owens, who triggered this coming political circus. I could not begin to write invective more vicious than that which has been hurled at him in recent days - some by members of his very own party.

The legislature can do some good, however, and that's by levying heavy fines against employers who hire illegal workers, and by denying those businesses tax deductions for the wages they pay them.

Illegal immigrants do not go anywhere where they cannot find work. Period. Pass those measures and human trafficking in Colorado stops. You don't pay for state services for a group that doesn't live here.

One of the governor's proposals in his call for the special session absolutely intrigued me:

To keep illegal residents away from the ballot box, he is also asking for a statute requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

They vote?

My heavens, they are absolutely diabolical when it comes to getting away with stuff in Colorado. And if this is true, they are clearly doing more than what half of us dyed-in-the- wool, born here, red-white-and-blue Americans often fail to do. Which would also explain a lot of things.

I had to check this out.

I called Alton Dillard, communications director with the Denver Election Commission.

Illegal immigrants vote? I was aghast.

He laughed.

"Let me put it this way," he said. "One, maybe two at some point, somewhere, might have slipped through the cracks. But, no, we don't see it."

Others must have been falling over themselves, too, because mine was only the latest of similar calls he had received.

So he polled the staff, Alton Dillard said. Maybe he had missed something.

"It obviously is coming up on everyone's radar now, but we've just never seen it. You hear these anecdotal stories, but we just don't have the impression that it ever happens."

After every election, he said, they also do an audit to see if people who voted were actually eligible to vote.

Any illegal immigrants voting?

"We just haven't seen it."

I called Faye Griffin, who runs elections in Jefferson County, with its 360,000 registered voters. Faye has worked elections there for about 30 years, the last 7 1/2 as clerk and recorder.

Illegal immigrants vote?

"I have never, ever seen evidence of that," Faye Griffin said.

We work through it.

It is true, she said, that pretty much all you need to register is a Colorado driver's license. And she has heard stories of people, particularly illegal immigrants, getting fake ones.

Yet that seems a lot of bother and risk for anyone to assume just to vote, particularly for a group of people who live their lives in the shadows.

And then, there are the challenge cards. They've had them for years, where anyone can challenge the ballot of someone else. In all of her time, she said, she's never seen a ballot challenged because the person who cast it was suspected of being illegal.

Beyond the illegal immigrant-voting question, there are other concerns with the governor's proposal. Presumably it will apply to everyone.

I asked Faye Griffin what I would need to prove my citizenship to get inside one of her voting booths. She paused for a long time.

"If someone asked me today, I guess I'd have to get my birth certificate, the one with the little foot on it, the one I used when I enrolled in school. Would that be good enough? I don't know.

"My Social Security card? Didn't I just read that counterfeits these days are at an all-time high? I don't know the answer, but it seems they've got a real bottleneck of a problem ahead of them when it comes to proof."

Faye Griffin reflects on all of it, and her tone changes to melancholy.

She's been in elections so long, she said, that it just became an article of faith for her to learn to trust everyone.

"Proof of citizenship was then, as now, an oath people took, saying they were a citizen by birth or naturalization. If people fibbed, there was and is nothing we could do to prove them wrong.

"Now, I guess with everything we're hearing, you don't know who to trust," Faye Griffin said. "It's kind of sad, a real about-face."

It seems that when we blame people not like us for the problems, real or perceived, that we face, we willingly and eagerly gin up any of a number of poorly conceived laws to soothe ourselves.

The evidence of this will be on display next week in the state Capitol. And maybe they will get something meaningful accomplished.

My hunch is they will settle for the meaningless, perhaps the unconstitutional. There will be outrage and, later, election ads. And for a second, some of us may feel better.

Yet real problems will persist.

Bill Johnson's column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Call him at 303-892-2763 or e-mail him at johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.

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