30,000 non-residents get voting slips in Colorado

Jena Griswold, who is the secretary of state for Colorado, has admitted that 30,000 people, all of whom are ineligible to vote, received postcards in the mail encouraging them to vote.

The Colorado postcards, which are in both English and Spanish, provide information on how to vote, but do not provide a voting form.

Griswold has said that the letters were sent out due to a glitch in their database which related to Colorado’s list of state driving licenses.

That Department of Revenue driver’s license list contains details of who have been issued a license for special purposes but are not U.S. citizens. Griswold’s office said that when a voting mailing list was done, the relevant formatting information was not included, therefore everyone on the list got a voting postcard.

Colorado is one of the 18 states, along with the District of Columbia, which provides driver’s licenses to non-U.S. citizens, according to the National Council on State Legislatures.

Colorado Public Radio News first reported the error. Griswold’s office has confirmed that an investigation is underway. They also said that they had no record of anyone who received the postcard attempting to vote.

Colorado’s Republican Party chair, Kristi Burton Brown hit out at Griswold for the error. Burton released a statement on Monday saying that “Jena Griswold continues to make easily avoidable errors just before ballots go out” by mail on October 17th.

Sean Morales-Doyle, who is the director of the Voting Rights Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that the fact the mistake was picked up on shows that Colorado’s voting system does work.

“It should show, first of all, that mistakes can happen, but secondly that there are checks in place to make sure mistakes don’t result in disaster,” Morales-Doyle said. “It’s not good this happened. It appears to be a case of human error and a database error and not some conspiracy, which I think some critics would seize on.”