With a new law that requires Colorado to mail ballots to all registered voters and allows same-day voter registration, the state may see an uptick in poll watchers on Nov. 4.
The Denver Post reported that conservatives have organized the Election Protection Squad, a group of poll watchers concerned about voter fraud.
According to the Denver Post, people affiliated with conservative radio station 560-AM KLZ sent out an appeal for volunteers to take turns watching mail-in ballot drop-off stations.
The appeal was circulated by email and asked people to take a “stand for liberty.”
“Some of you night owls can take a shift with your video camera after midnight. Others can watch during the daytime,” the email reads, according to the Denver Post. “But THE TIME TO ACT IS NOW.”
Republican state Senate candidate Laura Woods also sent the email to her supporters.
The Denver Post asked multiple people listed as contacts for the Election Protection Squad for a comment. One of the contacts, Kris Cook, host of KLZ’s Grassroots Radio Colorado, told the Post that “this is a private effort and we are not granting interviews.”
Democratic state Rep. Dickey Lee Hullinghorst, one of the sponsors of the new voting bill, told the Denver Post that he thinks that the new poll watching effort could be a response to the new legislation.
“I feel people are under the mistaken impression that we really have a lot of voter fraud going on and that somehow this election will encourage voter fraud,” Hullinghorst said. “I don’t understand what they think they’re going to find at the drop-off spots.”
Election officials are aware of the group, but are not concerned that they will do anything illegal.
Rich Coolidge, a spokesman for the Colorado Secretary of State, told TPM that the state allows poll watchers on election night. He had not specifically heard of the Election Protection Squad before the Denver Post report, but he said that candidates and groups have sent poll watchers to observe elections for the past couple of years.
El Paso County Clerk & Recorder Wayne Williams, who is also a Republican candidate for Colorado secretary of state, told the Denver Post that poll watchers may be looking out for people dropping off more than one ballot. He didn’t seem surprised that people were getting involved.
“And general elections are partisan races, so it’s not surprising that the activists would get involved,” he told the Denver Post.
But Williams also noted that poll watching was unnecessary since the drop-off locations in El Paso county are under video surveillance.
"I feel people are under the mistaken impression that we really have a lot of voter fraud going on "
Then I’m sorry, but even though I like your legislation, I have to say you’re kinda wrong. They don’t quite think that. Rather, they confabulate that. They know very well that voter fraud is not really a widespread, pervasive problem. That data gets thrown in their faces constantly. What they’re mad about is that people they consider to be the WRONG people are voting. They equate that with fraud in their minds because they don’t think “those people” SHOULD be voting or allowed to vote and so they invent a reason those people shouldn’t have been voting…one that they think will be more acceptable and palatable than “holy fuck, we need to stop all these fucking brown people from voting.”
They’re so completely and utterly convinced by conservative media, indoctrination, a heavy dose of pathological denial and good old fashioned confirmation bias within their insular conservative circles that the vast majority of “we the people” actually agrees with everything they are saying and proposing and pushing and opining, that they literally expect that their “side” should be winning, constantly and across the board; that any deviation from massive, overwhelming, landslide conservative take-over in a given election simply has no other explanation than that something untoward happened to cheat them out of their god-given rightful whiteful rule over the country. It starts from there. The next step is, they go and find out WHO actually voted to create this result and they see that it’s a bunch of brown people who represent a whole lot larger demographic share than they expected because it’s been growing while these conservatives slept comfortably assured its growth was not a problem for them.
Boom…election of a black man as POTUS…problem recognized.
At which point something something robotic conflation of brown people with illegal immigration and a whole lot of Faux programming and boom, voila, they weren’t supposed to be voting in the first place and clearly committed fraud if they did so. BUT, the vast majority of these conservatives know…and they CONSCIOUSLY know it…that there’s really still no fraud involved. They just have to run with that as the excuse because there’s nothing else to use as their excuse for trying to deliberately and systematically suppress the minority vote. Thin cover indeed…but the MSM dare not deign to see through it lest they be accused on not being fair or balanced.
“I don’t understand what they think they’re going to find at the drop-off spots.”
Brown people dropping off more than one piece of mail who can’t be proven to have dropped off more than one ballot. You know, as opposed to, say, their ballot and their electrical and credit card bills (cuz hey, we all know they don’t pay their bills, right?). At which point, that person will be accused of dropping off more than one ballot, can’t prove they didn’t, can;t prove they did and abracadabra…instant “proof” of widespread voter fraud will be declared by Faux news and the conservative media…all while the rest of the MSM equivocates and relishes the clicking activity they can generate by treating it as a legitimate nontroversy.
Edit: actually, are these specific ballot places or just mailboxes? Just realized I may have equated the two but they might be separate.
So was the Beavercreek Walmart in an Open Carry State.
hehe
And you can rest assured that some of these conservative assholes consider a black person carrying a ballot to be far more dangerous and in need of shooting than a black person meandering around a Walmart with a gun (BB gun or otherwise).
I will be dropping off two ballots: mine and my husband’s, who fills his ballot out, puts it in an envelope, and gives it to me. He works all day and is less inclined to go out when he gets home to drop it off. So these conservatives can suck it.