PERRY: Nesty business — Arapahoe DA’s voter fraud chickens come home to roost

Are you freaking kidding me? Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler pushed to spend about $11,000 worth of critically valuable lawyer time on reeling in two poor immigrants who may or may not have fudged their voter status.

Are we so short on real crime and criminals here in Aurora that the local DA has to stir this kind of crap up to fill the hours in a day?

Here’s the skinny: Several months ago, Colorado’s most partisan secretary of state ever, Scott Gessler, announced that he was going to clean up Colorado’s already sparkling clean election system that mysteriously has handed liberals a lot of victories over the past few years. Somehow, the state’s election system has gotten so haywire that it kept people like Tom “Nuke ‘em!” Tancredo and Dan “Undercover Reimburser” Maes from being elected governor.

Despite it being clear that Gessler was a lawyer who made a living out of suing for Republican political causes, he got elected secretary of state. After taking a bruising from the media when he said he was going to moonlight for his politically oriented law firm because his new state job didn’t pay very well, he backed off and just drew boos for spending state money on a trip to the GOP National Convention.

To clear his name, he announced that he was going to clean up the rampant voter fraud committed by illegal immigrants in this state. So he started having his staff compare voter rolls to those who may or may not have had anything to do with U.S. immigration services.

The whole thing blew up in his face when he pissed off a whole lot of legal immigrants-turned-citizens who didn’t appreciate Gessler impugning their integrity or voter credentials. What Gessler didn’t turn up was much fraud. After sending about 4,000 letters to voters his staff suspect of being non-citizens, about a couple dozen people dropped their voter registrations.

In August, Gessler gave Boulder DA Stan Garnett a list of suspect voter-terrorists similar to the one that Brauchler got earlier this year. His office breezed through the suspect 17 voter criminals and confirmed all of them legit in fast order. Garnett, a Democrat, told the Boulder Daily Camera the whole thing was nothing more than partisan political ploy and a colossal waste of taxpayer dollars and resources.

“Local governments and county clerks do a really good job regulating the integrity of elections, and I’ll stand by that record any day of the week,” Garnett said. “We don’t need state officials sending us on wild goose chases for political reasons.”

Brauchler didn’t think so.

He got his list of a whopping 41 potential ne’er-do-wells in July, and put six, yes, that would be six district attorney investigators on the trail to find out who had jeopardized the sanctity of Colorado’s election process by feigning good voting credentials.

After 300 lawyer hours, which cost about $11,000 if you could find someone to pay you for them, Brauchler and Team Intrepid found out that two of these heinous voters were total evildoers. Time to throw the book at one 72-year-old Ethiopian dude that dared to befoul our local elections. And it’s curtains for one 47-year-old Polish guy who also registered to and actually did cast a bogus vote. As a bonus, Arapahoe County snagged two real U.S. citizens who were paid vote registerers and didn’t follow the law. Death to them, too.

Feeling safer, Aurora? I know I’ll sleep well tonight knowing that those two foreign villains won’t be casting votes for Communist Party types or, worse, Democrats ever again.

So consider this. There are about 380,000 registered voters in Arapahoe County alone, and Brachler’s DA district also includes tens of thousands of additional voters in Douglas and Elbert counties. Of those Arapahoe County registrations, 140,438 voted earlier this month.

There are 3.6 MILLION registered voters in Colorado, of which, about half voted this month.

You can see where this is going, but it’s too much fun to stop. I agree that voter fraud is a bad thing. But I know enough about election law and how county clerks operate to know that it’s not a problem. At all. Now, thanks to this unbelievable waste of resources, you do, too!

So here’s what Brauchler and every other Colorado DA that thinks this is a good idea needs to explain to taxpayers, legal and illegal: What’s the crushing caseload for a deputy DA in your judicial district? I have had a parade of district attorneys parade through here over the years desperate for money to hire lawyers to make sure cases don’t slip through the cracks.

That clearly must not be the case anymore in Arapahoe County, where six staffers can spend 300 hours tracking down two dudes with accents and a hankering to throw a United States election.

While this is all so ludicrous it’s irresistible to make fun of, it’s really a sad and dangerous compulsion. The message to new neighbors with brown skin, thick accents or names that are hard to pronounce is that if you vote, the government is going to go over you with a microscope looking for something wrong, and if even smells a little funny, boy, Inspector Gadget and Co. will be knocking on your door to answer a few, or several, questions.

Would you vote if you were a new citizen knowing this fate awaits you? Especially if you’re from a country where you finally got away from this kind of thing?

Hell, no. But these immigrants can take comfort in knowing that those of us allowed to vote without an inquisition will be making smart choices for them in the future.

Reach Aurora Sentinel editor Dave Perry at 303-750-7555 or dperry@aurorasentinel.com