On Radio, Gessler said there’s a “misquote” in Denver Post article on voting rolls

On his KOA radio show yesterday (June 11), Mike Rosen asked Secretary of State Scott Gessler about a paragraph toward the end of a  July 10 Denver Post article about Gessler’s efforts to get the Department of Homeland Security review lists of voters.

Rosen read the following sentence from The Denver Post:

“The state has also identified 430 people who contacted Gessler’s or their local county elections office, and asked to be removed from the voter registration list because they are not citizens.”

Then Rosen and Gessler had this exchange:

Gessler: “Well, let me tell you exactly what’s going on. There’s a little bit of a misquote there. We’ve got 430 people statewide over the last several years who either, when they filled out a voter-registration form said, I am not a citizen, and some of them, many of them, were erroneously registered to vote.”

Rosen: They checked the wrong box when they filled out the form?

Gessler: Well, there’s a question as to whether they checked the wrong box or the right box. I think a lot of people are being truthful. They are saying they are not a citizen but they think they have the right to vote, which they don’t. Or they actually wrote us, and there are a lot of people who wrote us. And I say ‘us,’ the state, one of the clerks and recorders or someone like that, and said, please remove me from the voting rolls. I am not a citizen… They were not on the voting rolls. We’ve taken those people off.

Gessler is saying there’s an incorrect statement in The Post, and it appears to come from Gessler spokesman Rich Coolidge, that 430 people contacted the state and asked to be removed from the voter rolls.

What’s the correct figure? He doesn’t appear to know, and that’s what media types need to keep in mind when Gessler makes any numerical utterance.

 

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