Posted on 10/24/2014 10:02:20 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
The autumn skies are bright blue this afternoon in the Mile High City. The vistas of the nearby Rockies are as sublime as the mild breezes that amble down the street. And yet Marilyn Marks could not be more worried. She fears that Republican representative Cory Gardner could lose a U.S. Senate seat in the mail — literally.
“Gardner got the Denver Post’s endorsement,” Marks tells me. “Amazing, and he has a real chance of winning. But this ‘100 percent absentee ballot’ disaster is likely to undermine every GOP candidate in a tight race,” adds Marks, a clean-vote advocate with the Rocky Mountain Foundation.
Mail-in ballots once were reserved, on request, for those absent on Election Day — because of vacations, business, study, or military service — or too infirm to reach the polls.
Colorado has jumbo-sized this concept.
Coloradans now vote universally on mail-in ballots, whether they want to or not. Democrats passed and signed the 2013 Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act with zero Republican support — just like Obamacare. Some 3.6 million such ballots have reached active voters and even those who last voted in 2008. That’s right. People who have avoided the polls for the last six years — whether from ignorance, boredom, disillusionment, relocation, or even death — have had ballots mailed to their last known addresses.
“I’m going to people’s houses where they’re getting seven ballots to a household,” Republican state senator Ted Harvey told the Washington Times. “Their children when they were 18 registered to vote there. They’re now 30 years old and living somewhere else, but now that their inactive voting status is now active, the clerk and recorders are required to send them ballots. . . . If Mom and Dad wanted to, they could vote them.”
“We have a lot of the adult-children-not-living-at-home problem here,” Marks says. “I frequently have run into parents who vote the ballots and forge the signatures of their kids and think it is okay ‘because the government sends us the ballots.’” For her relentless efforts to cleanse Colorado’s elections of often-Democrat-inspired mischief, the Denver Post calls the former trucking-company executive “the Queen of Pain.”
Colorado’s mail-in ballots may be left in drop boxes, such as this one, which are totally unguarded and incapable of knowing if ballots are being deposited in illegal numbers.
In another potential headache, “harvesters” will collect ballots door-to-door. Citizens legally may gather up to ten ballots and mail them or deposit them in unsupervised, official drop boxes. This is admirable for, say, a granddaughter helping her elderly relatives. However, nothing prevents a political activist from gathering ten ballots on Monday, ten on Tuesday, and ten more on Wednesday.
“If it’s over ten, that’s a violation,” Colorado secretary of state Scott Gessler told KUSA-TV. “How you catch that? We don’t have those systems in place right now.”
Even worse, if harvested ballots favoring the “wrong” candidate vanish — well, stuff happens.
“The proliferation of ‘ballot harvesting’ ranges from perfectly legal campaigning to pressure tactics to undue influence to intimidation to forgery of ballots and everything in between,” Marks says.
During last summer’s local election on natural-gas fracking, Loveland residents complained that vote harvesters impersonated government workers. “The city does NOT employ anyone to collect ballots cast in Loveland municipal elections,” officials reassured voters in a June 16 statement.
Also, apathetic voters sometimes dump mail-in ballots in wastebaskets near P.O. boxes and in apartment lobbies. Marks says that she previously photographed mail-in ballots in the garbage. However, “I don’t even bother to take them anymore, it is so commonplace.”
This is a jackpot for fraudsters. Undercover investigator James O’Keefe of Project Veritas released a film Wednesday in which Greenpeace’s Christen Topping explains where to glean discarded ballots.
A “lower class” building at “Sixth and Belmar Circle” in “ghetto Aurora” is promising, Topping says. “North Aurora is a lot of people who — I hate to, like, put in clichés — but people don’t care.”
Greenpeace staffer Christen Topping recommends “ghetto Aurora” as Colorado’s go-to place for discarded mail-in ballots. Source: Project Veritas
Meredith Hicks is a director for Work for Progress, a nonprofit laboring to reelect Senator Mark Udall (D., Colo.). Hicks urges O’Keefe to harness these abandoned ballots. “That’s not even, like, lying and stealing,” she says. “If someone throws out a ballot, like, if you want to fill it out, you should do it.”
Also, voters claiming to be confined can request emergency ballots as late as 5:00 p.m. on Election Day, sight unseen, and receive and return them via e-mail before polls close two hours later. There is no mechanism to confirm the legitimacy of such e-mail addresses, especially on such short notice.
Election officials hope to combat fraud by comparing computerized signature records with those on ballot envelopes. This hardly comforts Adams County Libertarian and Green Party watcher Harvie Branscomb.
“In this county, about 70 percent of the ballot envelopes are reviewed by election judges, and the remainder are approved automatically by computer and unseen by humans,” Branscomb tells me. “I am seeing some apparently non-matching signatures on return-mail ballot envelopes that are being approved for counting.”
Colorado voters should husband their ballots, keep them from strangers, and shred them if they prefer not to vote. They also should drop them off as late as possible. Even imagining perfect honesty, leaving marked ballots sitting around between mid-October, when officials sent them to voters, and Election Day could leave some lost, slipped twixt the cracks, or gone with the wind.
As demonstrated by Senate Democrat Al Franken’s 312-vote 2008 victory in Minnesota and former Republican president George W. Bush’s 537-vote 2000 win in Florida, a rounding error’s worth of disputed ballots can make a loser a victor — and vice versa.
A smattering of innocently misplaced, carefully fictionalized, or maliciously destroyed mail-in ballots could determine whether Cory Gardner reaches the Senate or Mark Udall (who voted 99 percent with Obama) remains. That outcome, in turn, could decide whether Harry Reid plays second fiddle with or returns as conductor of America’s favorite 100-member symphony.
And that’s why Marilyn Marks worries.
Make a mockery of the system and encourage everybody to cheat.
Get it up to 300% turnout.
Voting is already a complete joke in this country. Lets prove it to everybody.
NOT fine! Those Coloradans, elected through fraud, have a say in the US Congress — perhaps the deciding votes!
Somebody needs to appeal this election malfeasance to the SCOTUS and stop this practice immediately!
It will take a Colorado voter to bring this to court.
With 143% precincts in the Democrats win 65-35
They have legal pot and no democracy
what a trade
idiots
Think there’ll be any disenfranchisement lawsuits over this when the unanticipated landslides happen there?
Or do the RATS know ‘when’ to stop counting votes? We need conservative precinct clerks to withhold results as late as possible.
In Minnesota they come by the trunkfull.
That “Somebody” is the Republican in Congress elected to represent other Republicans .... the guy collecting a paycheck and sitting on his a$# doing nothing while this stuff goes on!
The ‘Republicans’ in Congress are equally to blame because they are NOT doing anything about it!
Have they taken an oath to sleep through their entire tenure in office?
Withhold votes as late as possible?
Oh please! Yeah, bring a squirt gun to a gun fight to save Colorado. Good job!
The Dems just legalized one of their old fraud strategies.
They used to have a friendly Dem precinct guy mail absentee ballots to an entire neighborhood and then tell an accomplice what day they will delivered so accomplice can drive around behind the postman to collect them, vote them and mail them in.
Now it’s all nice a legal like.
Bingo.
No one should get their hopes up about republicans winning the senate. Voter fraud will never let that happen!
Dear Departed, Illegal Aliens, and family pets,
Vote early and vote often. Democrats are depending on you.
Sincerely,
The DNC
Not only will we see it, but we will see an increasing number of places where this will happen as time goes on. Looks like voting fraud is going to go mainstream just like about everything else has.
After the last few elections they cannot be surprised by it.
Voting in Colorado is no longer moral or sacred. They encourage cheating.
Eventually democrats will always win 99% of the vote.
Was it moral for the colonies to kill British soldiers? Was it legal?
I hope someone is watching the postal workers in the Red states.
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