Suthers, Waak trade jabs over voter lists

By Myung Oak Kim, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 16, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.

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The battle over management of Colorado's voter list continued Wednesday with angry exchanges between Attorney General John Suthers and state Democratic Party Chairwoman Pat Waak.

It all started with an opinion issued Tuesday by Suthers' office saying Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman followed the law by allowing county clerks to remove duplicate voter files from the state database.

Waak accused Suthers, also a Republican, of taking part in a GOP effort to stop people from voting.

Suthers shot back with a letter Wednesday morning.

"I understand there's a lot of gamesmanship in politics, Pat," he wrote. "But is it really necessary to respond with vitriolic boilerplate that has the potential to further frustrate public confidence in the electoral process? I would suggest that even politics doesn't justify such irresponsibility."

Waak quickly responded, accusing Suthers' office of issuing decisions that disenfranchise voters. "What would give the public more confidence in the electoral process is if the Republican Party and its elected officials stopped using intimidation tactics and creating administrative snafus," Waak wrote.

Removal of the nearly 2,500 duplicate names in recent months does not mean those people can't vote, Deputy Attorney General Maurice Knaizer wrote Tuesday. Their names, with the most updated information, are still on the list, Knaizer wrote.

Today, Waak is scheduled to hold a press conference outside the El Paso County clerk's office to criticize that office's dissemination of what Democrats call false information about college student voting rules.

And at noon today, a variety of voter registration and interest groups plan to hold a press conference outside Coffman's office in Denver to call on him to change a policy that resulted in more than 6,000 voter registration forms being classified as incomplete.

Meanwhile, Al Kolwicz, a Boulder voting activist who opposes mail voting, filed a complaint alleging the statewide voter database does not meet federal standards because it fails to remove duplicate voter files. He wants Coffman's office to stop processing mail ballots until his complaint is addressed.

"There's nothing credible about his complaint," Coffman said.

Mail ballots by the numbers

1,435,932 ballots mailed to voters

100,416 ballots filled out and returned

30,047 ballots received Wednesday

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