PERRY: SOS Williams’ mail-ballot scare gets a stamp of disapproval

While you were sleeping, Colorado, Secretary of State Wayne Williams pretty much nuked this year’s election and threw serious shade on the big 2016 election in the Centennial State.

While everyone was still moping around Tuesday morning about hot dogs and bacon causing cancer, Williams quietly sent out this little missive: Don’t mail your mail-in ballots, Colorado, because they might not, probably won’t, get counted.

Williams said that he’s been talking with county clerks across the state recently who don’t trust the U.S. Postal Service to get your ballot mailed from your house or nearby post office to your county clerk’s office — in a week. A week. Seven days minus Sunday.

So, as public service to you, dear voter, Williams sent out the news that years and years of creating one of the country’s most successful mail-ballot systems was all for naught because the post office sucks that bad, and he wants your vote to count.

That was big news to postal officials in Denver. Not long after Williams flipped the Twitter bird to the public and the post office, Denver USPS spokesman David Rupert said he didn’t know anything about Williams’ telling people not to mail their ballots. Neither did Adams County Clerk and Recorder Stan Martin. Neither did Arapahoe County Clerk Matt Crane. But all three of them also said they had no worries that any ballot mailed here in the metro area by Saturday would get to a county clerk’s office in plenty of time to get counted.

“All of our processes are running fine,” Rupert told Aurora Sentinel reporter Quincy Snowdon. “You can continue to mail your ballots this week and the Postal Service will deliver them in time for Election Day.”

So what the hell?

After the Sentinel ran a story saying that local folks here didn’t know what Williams was talking about, he followed up with saying that clerky types in El Paso County were concerned.

Ohhhhh. I see. This is an El Paso County thing.

And Williams said postal officials he talked to told him your ballot had only a 95-percent chance of making it to a county clerk’s office by Election Day — Tuesday Nov. 3 — if you mailed it Tuesday, Oct. 27.

I see. What is it with Colorado Springs types? Home of chief anti-tax protester and reporter kicker, Douglas Bruce. Home of the state’s current number-one lawmaker whack, Rep. Gordon “Dr. Chaps” Klingenschmidt (Google it). Home of Sheriff Terry “Happy Pants” Maketa. Home of Focus on the Family. Home of Congressman Doug “Joel-Hefley-Who?” Lamborn. This is the part of the state that allowed right-wing activists to recall two Democratic state lawmakers in 2013 because they voted for Colorado’s baby-step gun control measures after the Aurora theater shooting in 2012. Of course not all the voters recalled the two lawmakers, because the interim Republicans they installed were replaced by two new Democrats the following year.

Williams himself is the former El Paso County Clerk. He gave himself a black eye before running for his new job in 2014 by oddly clipping hours when recall voters could vote, even after professing to want to make voting as accessible to everyone as possible. He pummeled himself again by pushing away from the state county clerk association because they overwhelmingly supported an election reform bill he didn’t like. The bill strengthened Colorado’s mail-in ballot laws for all elections, and after decades of protest — much of it from Williams — finally allowed state residents to register and vote on the same day. Republicans hate that because they think it benefits Democrats.

I’m willing to give Williams the benefit of the doubt that what he may have done this week was unintended. By going rogue and telling all of Colorado not to mail their ballots, he immediately caused a state already gripped by voter apathy and laziness to think about what Williams is saying about driving their ballot somewhere. How many thousands of voters were listening to the news Tuesday night and said, “Well, the hell with it”?

Plenty.

Worse, Williams has now cast a pall on the entire Colorado mail-ballot election system. If the secretary of state says the Postal Service is too lame to get your ballot to a place it can get counted, who wants to invest four-bits worth of postage to gamble on voting when so many people don’t want to anyway?

A lot of serious conservatives do, that’s who. The far-right fights for making it tougher to vote every way they can, from state legislatures to the Supreme Court. Voter ID laws, reduced voting hours, increased registration mandates, and accusations of rampant voter fraud, which in Arapahoe County and Colorado turned out to be completely baseless last year.

This is all a pretty big deal in an election year when so few voters decide the candidates and issues as it is — races that often are won by handfuls of votes.

Maybe all the apathetic voters who gave up this week after getting Williams’ message will be equally spread across party lines, issues and candidates, simply uniformly reducing this year’s already anemic voter turnout. Maybe Jeffco voters, on the verge of kicking a trio of activist school board members off that board, will fight the “screw it” apathy urge and march their ballots right down to the county clerk’s office, miles away, to make sure their vote is heard.

Maybe the state Legislature will look into how the U.S. Postal Service deteriorated in Colorado to the point that it can no longer move an envelope a few miles in a week.

Maybe everyone will be watching what’s going on at the secretary of state’s office much more closely from now on.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Twitter or Facebook, or reach him at dperry@aurorasentinel.com.