No, Colorado’s Election System is Not the “Gold Standard”

Since the announcement by Major League Baseball that the 2021 All-Star Game was moving to Denver in protest of Georgia’s changes to their voting laws, the debate has raged over how Colorado’s voting laws compare to Georgia’s. Conservatives have claimed that Colorado’s laws are no less restrictive than those in Georgia, while liberals have claimed that Colorado has a less restrictive and discriminatory system. Colorado politicians like Jared Polis and Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold have called Colorado the “gold standard” of voting systems and the envy of the rest of the country:

Journalists started producing comparatives between Colorado and Georgia voting laws:

Georgia’s governor identified the woke politics behind the decision:

A fair comparison between the two states shows very little difference in voting laws between Colorado and Georgia, except that Colorado’s definition of “ID” is very broad, allowing ballots to be requested with a wide array of “proof,” including utility bills, pilot licenses, Medicare cards, and student IDs:

All voters who vote at the polls must provide identification. If you are voting by mail for the first time, you may also need to provide a photocopy of your identification when you return your mail ballot.

https://www.sos.state.co.us/pubs/elections/vote/acceptableFormsOfID.html

Colorado also sends mail-in ballots to every registered voter whether or not they request one.

Rather than these things making Colorado the “gold standard,” the differences actually increase the likelihood of voter fraud in Colorado, where a non-citizen can presumably register and vote without any confirmation of their legal residence and voters can potentially cast a mail-in ballot and vote in person on election day.

Colorado’s Secretary of State was recently sued for outdated voter rolls, as Judicial Watch found that 40 out of 64 Colorado counties had more registered voters than the number of residents eligible to vote. Inspection of 2020 presidential election data in Colorado shows algorithmic manipulation in vote returns, coinciding with the 2014 adoption of Dominion Voting Systems and state-wide unsolicited mail-in balloting.

Colorado electronically matches signatures on ballots to ensure mail-in ballots were cast by the registered voter, and signature-rejected ballots can be re-verified by presenting legal identification. Yet the vulnerability of fraudulent registration remains.

Colorado has one of the highest voter turnouts in the country, but without common sense ID rules (like those recently enacted in Georgia), there’s simply no way to prevent non-resident voting or voting more than once. Our system cannot be considered the “gold standard.”