Caldara just smiles as Gessler deflects blame from his office and points his finger at County Clerks as the cause of registration problems
Here’s how Jon Caldara introduced Secretary of State Scott Gessler last week when Gessler appeared on Caldara’s Channel 12 TV show:
You know him, you love him, and he rubs so many people the wrong way because you do your job – Scott Gessler.
About what you’d expect, right?
Except in this case it was particularly ironic because during the interview, Gessler blamed County Clerks for not doing their job properly, for being a root cause of mostly bogus voter registration problems that Gessler alleges.
Asked by Caldara why noncitizens appear on the voting rolls, Gessler basically threw the County Clerks under the bus, and Caldara didn’t bother to ask if Gessler felt any responsibility himself.
“At the Secretary of State’s office you should catch that and not register them,” Caldara said.
Gessler responded by saying, first, that people register improperly because they don’t understand the law.
Then he said that this is the Clerks’ fault, as if Gessler operated on a distant planet form them.
Gessler: It’s the clerks that actually go through those forms and register people to vote–the county clerks, and it secondly shows that there is some slop as far as people not carefully looking at those registration forms and making sure that if someone says, “no” they’re not registered to vote, you know, that person shouldn’t be registered.
Is Gessler saying he could do the clerks job better than the clerks? Caldara didn’t ask.
But it makes you wonder, especially because Gessler said later that we have a “problem” with Colorado election law, whether he’s going to make a play for greater control of state voter registration.
A good question next time Gessler puts his face in front of reporters, which he’s done a few times during his reign.