Politics

Walking into a concert this weekend, I got stopped by someone collecting signatures for a ballot proposal. I normally just ignore people trying to interrupt me on the street, but democracy is important, so I stopped to look. He described the measure as being to protect mail-in voting in Colorado, but it only took a couple seconds of skimming to realize that’s not what the measure was; I let him know that’s what I thought and walked away.

A couple days later now, I was wondering if I’d gotten things wrong and it actually did have a pro-democracy angle to it, so I decided to look it up. The ballot measure was Proposed Initiative #362 “Mail Ballot Voter Identification”, one of a set of three near-identical measures (the other two being 363 and 364), so I can’t actually be sure which I was shown there. All three boil down to the same thing: they would amend the Colorado Constitution to require voters to write the last four digits of some form of their ID on the outside of their mail-in ballot envelope, in addition to the signature that’s already required.

So…why?

None of them actually make voting more secure. The state already verified your identity when you registered, copying a few digits onto the envelope won’t verify anything that’s not already handled by your signature. What it does do is add friction. It makes voting a bit harder for you and it creates a new way you can make a mistake: if you get one digit wrong you’re going to have to deal with curing your ballot. It’s also going to slow counting down and introduce new requirements on that side around verifying the data and around chasing down and curing ballots.

So why pitch this as protecting mail-in voting? In Boulder you’re going to get a lot more signatures talking about how you want to protect democracy and safeguard access to mail-in voting than talking about the alternatives.

The proposers though are Chuck Broerman, the Republican El Paso County Treasurer, and Suzanne Taheri, an attorney and former Deputy Secretary of State, both of whom have a history of submitting conservative ballot proposals. This one fits into a clear anti-democratic pattern aimed at tightening access to voting, not on expanding it and getting as many people as possible to get out there and vote. And if they really have a goal of tightening access to voting, the move should be to convince me that’s a good thing. Stop me on the street and make the argument that writing down some numbers from my ID will actually improve things. Make the best case possible for that. Our democracy thrives with disagreement and we all become better for it.

Trying to pretend you care about access to mail-in voting though is wrong, cowardly, and the opposite of where we should be going as a country. Canvasing outside of a Fourth of July concert in that way is antithetical to what the holiday is supposed to celebrate.