69 rejected ballots get second look
Analysis spurred by lawsuit against secretary of state
By Myung Oak Kim, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)
Published November 26, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
The secretary of state's office is checking whether 69 provisional ballots that were rejected by county election workers should be counted, a spokesman said Tuesday.
The analysis is being done as a result of a lawsuit filed last month by state and national voter-rights groups against Secretary of State Mike Coffman.
The plaintiffs claimed that Coffman inappropriately removed scores of people from the voter rolls in violation of a federal law that prohibits purging of voter files within 90 days of a federal election. Coffman contends that it was legal to remove 44,000 voter files since May.
About 365 provisional ballots were cast by voters who were on the list of 44,000 canceled files, the state said. Of those, 69 were rejected for a variety of reasons, including that the voter was serving a felony sentence or had moved to a different county or state.
The most common reason for rejection was that the person's voter registration form appeared to list a bad address. Notification cards were returned as undeliverable by the postal service within 20 days of the voter registration being filed, triggering cancellation of the voter file.
Provisional ballots are cast at the polls because of voter registration problems or because a person had signed up to vote by mail but wanted to cast their ballot at the polls. They are processed after Election Day.
More than 53,000 provisional ballots were cast statewide on Nov. 4 and during the two weeks of early voting. Roughly 80 percent of them have been accepted and added to the final count. The official results are not finished.
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November 26, 2008
9:59 p.m.
Suggest removal
jbowen43 writes:
Mail is returned for a variety of reasons, and not always because the addressee does not live at the address on the mail piece. The Secretary of State's office knows this and should never use a returned mail piece as a reason for denying a citizen the right to vote. If it takes legislation to force the Secretary of State to do the job in an ethical manner then that's what must happen.