Colorado voters have been in for a ride this summer, making national news for un-registering to vote by the thousands and switching their status to “confidential.” Between June 29 and Sept. 17 of this year, 6,648 Coloradans, most of them Democrats, unregistered according to numbers provided by the Secretary of State’s office. The kicker: Only 531 of them have re-registered, the office said today. That revelation drew rebuke from elections watchdogs in Colorado. “This is a direct result of a presidential commission whose creation was predicated on a false narrative,” said Denise Maes, the public policy director for the ACLU of Colorado. “I do hope all of these eligible voters eventually do re-register in time for the next election.”
In the past few months, voters told election officials they were taking themselves off the rolls in response to a task force set up by President Donald Trump that requested the publicly available personal information of voters in all 50 states. Trump’s commission formed after Trump said, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election he won. Some voters in Colorado said they didn’t want their voter data in the hands of an administration they did not trust.
Elena Nuñez, director of Common Cause Colorado, noted the state has been a leader in advancing policies for convenient, accessible, and secure elections. Coloradans vote by mail and have same-day registration, which has led to high voter turnout.
“It is a problem that the vast majority of Colorado voters who unregistered to vote because they feared the actions of the Pence-Kobach commission have chosen not to register to vote again,” she said. “We remain concerned that the Pence-Kobach commission, premised on the lie of rampant illegal voting, is nothing more than a partisan attempt to manipulate our voting processes that will make it harder for eligible Americans to vote.”
Full Article: Only 531 of the 6,648 Colorado voters who unregistered since June have come back on the rolls | The Colorado Independent.