Johnny’s Last Chance for Colorado GONE
They look angry, don’t they? There’s a reason for that.
The McKeating Campaign is intellectually bankrupt, morally repugnant, and threatened with extinction. I think they realized a long time ago that there is no way Johnny and Caribou Barbie are going to win a popular election, so they’ve fallen back on that tried and true wingtard tactic of disenfranchising as many voters of color as they can. MAYBE if they “level the playing field” by leaving a largely white electorate, they can squeak by. To that end, McKeating’s bagman campaign director, Rick Davis, has been coordinating voter suppression efforts with friendly Gopper officials all ovver the country. One of the places McKeating’s people have been working HARD with local officials to suppress voters is Colorado, where McKeating is so far behind that the only possible way he can win the state is to disenfranchise many thousands of voters.
Tonight’s news, then, is particularly bad for Johnny, as you will see.
Tens of thousands of Coloradans who had been removed from the state’s voter rolls will be allowed to vote in next week’s election and given extra protections so their ballots are counted, under an agreement reached late Wednesday in federal court here.
The voters’ names had been removed by Mike Coffman, the Colorado secretary of state, who said he did so because the voters had moved out of state or were listed more than once on the rolls. But Mr. Coffman was sued by a coalition of voting rights and other groups who said such purges were generally prohibited by federal law within 90 days of an election.
Under the agreement, voters removed from the rolls will be permitted to cast provisional ballots, and those ballots will be counted unless election officials can prove the voters were not eligible. To strike such ballots, county election officials must conduct an extensive records review on each one, a decision that must then be reviewed by Mr. Coffman’s office.
“This is unprecedented,” said Elizabeth Westfall, a lawyer for the Advancement Project, a civil rights group that helped file the lawsuit. “We are really thrilled that there will be this degree of unprecedented scrutiny and protection for these purged voters when they cast their provisional ballots.”
Mr. Coffman issued a statement Thursday saying he still believed that Colorado’s election practices adhered to federal law and that “our goal has always been to have a system in place where every voter, who has the legal right to cast a ballot, is allowed to do so.”
Edward B. Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University and an authority on voting litigation nationwide, said the settlement was noteworthy because many states had put the onus on voters to prove that their provisional ballots were legitimate before they could be counted. The settlement shifts this responsibility to the state, Mr. Foley said, and is more in keeping with the spirit of the federal Help America Vote Act of 2002, which calls for election officials to count a provisional ballot if they can determine the voter’s eligibility.
I think Johnny was doomed in Colorado anyway, but this is more than just dooming his chances; this is a funeral for his Colorado campaign. The former Chimpy strongholds of Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Iowa, and probably Nevada are now in the bag for Obama. Based on most known polls, Ohio is almost certainly going to flip for Obama, North Carolina looks gone as well, Florida increasingly looks like Obama can squeak a little victory out, and now even Georgia is threatening to flip over.
Thanks to a moronic monkey, Methuselah, and a moose hunting airhead, the electoral map appears to be ready for some serious changes. Not even disenfranchisement looks like it’ll be enough to save Johnny.
Tags: 2008 election, colorado, disenfranchisement, failure, mccain
