Station: 850 KOA

Show: Rosen

Guest: Gessler

Link: http://www.850koa.com/pages/mikerosen.html

Date: 10/06/2010

Topics: Voter Photo Identification, Mail In Ballots, Bi-Lingual Ballots, Military Oversee Ballots, Paper Ballots, And Initiative Process.

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GESSLER: I think this race definitely presents a clear choice between Mr. Buescher and myself as to which way the direction of the state should go. The main job of the Secretary of States office, that is about 80-90% of the job, is making sure we have fair elections here in Colorado. And I bring a fresh perspective .My background is in the private sector, started as a federal prosecutor, managed several companies and focused on elections law. And Mr. Buescher has spent many many years in government as a government administrator and a legislator. And my view is that Colorado has had good elections in the past but I do think we are heading in the wrong direction because of efforts to push thinks like same day voter registration which has resulted in massive fraud in other states and sometimes a lack of can-do attitude. When the military oversees votes, when Congress required states to move quickly on that, Colorado, we had a lot of foot dragging and not a lot of effort to meet federal law. So my view is, if we are going to have fair elections, which I think everyone wants, what we need to do is have clean unambiguous rules that are applied equally to everyone. That also means cleaning up some of the slop in our election systems.  Our database is still pretty messy, we do have problems along those lines and so as a result what we need to do is make sure you are going to have someone in there who has a real focus on election integrity and preventing vote fraud. And that is why I am running, to do that.

ROSEN: Can we also count on the integrity of mail in ballots, is that system safe?

GESSLER:  Again, I will say generally. I do think it has some vulnerabilities. When you have a sloppy database, and we do have problems with our database despite some progress, the problem with the mail in ballot is that you are delivering a live ballot. So somebody can be registered under their first initial and middle name. Or they can also be registered and registered under their first name, middle initial.  A mail in ballot system is not going to pick up that problem where as someone comes in live and has to be eyeballed face to face, that does prevent that type of fraud from happening. So there are still types of fraud with mail in ballots.  Think we need to focus on that and need to be a little bit more concerned than what we have in the past.

GESSLER: We have active voters, we have inactive voters, and there are cancelled voters. Removing the duplicates between cancelled voters and active voters is a step in the right direction but it is by no means everything.  Inactive voters are still in the database, they still have every right to vote, and they can walk in any day and vote. And they still receive a lot of the mailings. I have talked to clerks and records who say the procedures they are required to follow, so these hand-by-hand movements. So of the larger clerks in the larger counties, they told me that they can put what resources they have on it and it is going to take them five years before they have fully cleaned up their databases. To simply sit back and say we’re fine, everything is well, I think that is not true. There still needs to be a lot more focus on that.

GESSLER: If they have not voted in the last general election they are become inactive. And I think what you are seeing there, especially because of the heavy skewed towards the large number democrat inactive voters. I think that indicates variances in the counties and how focused they are. You have some heavily democratic counties that are less focused on cleaning up their databases than other counties.  What you always look for to find out if there is a problem with the database is statistical anomalies. When there is some thing that pops out that seems a little unusual. Here there is something unusual there. You have two times, twice as many inactive democrat voters as you do Republican voters. That is something that needs investigation. I am not saying there is massive fraud or anything there but that is very unusual to have those statistical anomalies.