"Fact is, my office has every reason to believe that thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in Colorado," [Gessler] maintains. "Though the opponents of this bill want us to look the other way or bury our heads in the sand, House Bill 1252 will allow us to inquire for more information using public databases" such as jury recusal lists, among others."
Kjersten Forseth, executive director of ProgressNow Colorado, a liberal advocacy group, begs to differ.
"The Secretary of State doesn't specify which database he's going to compare voter registration rolls against," she notes. "At the press conference, he was talking about the DMV [Division of Motor Vehicles], but there are people who can get a license who aren't permanent, legal U.S. residents. So that's not clear. But once he does the comparison and, say, Kjersten Forseth shows up as somebody not on the list, I have to prove I'm actually a resident or else I get kicked off the voter roles. That seems patently unfair."
Moreover, she continues, Gessler "is not 100 percent certain" that the discrepancies between voter rolls and non-citizen records he cited represent "actual illegal residents who were registered to vote in the state. And there's never been a documented case of voter fraud here. So he's wasting our time and our taxpayer dollars."
Read the full article at Westword
