The Post editorial: Good call. Legal glitch shouldn’t have kept 5th District Congressman Doug Lamborn off the ballot.

We’ve had our differences over the years with 5th District Congressman Doug Lamborn — to put it mildly — but the idea that he should be kept off the ballot over a legal requirement that tramples on the rights of registered voters who signed a petition in good faith is not only ludicrous, it’s outrageous.

That’s why we’re pleased that U.S. District Court Judge Philip Brimmer on Tuesday concluded that a residency requirement for petition circulators was unjustified and ordered the state to certify Lamborn for the ballot.

There is no question Lamborn’s campaign collected enough signatures to qualify the six-term congressman for the Republican primary in June. After a line-by-line inspection, Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams certified 1,269 valid signatures of Republicans registered in the 5th District — well in excess of the 1,000 Lamborn needed. But political gamesmanship immediately reared its head in a dispute over whether several of the petition circulators were residents of Colorado.

A state district court concluded one was not and the supreme court followed by ruling against a second, leaving Lamborn 58 signatures short of the threshold and effectively throwing him off the ballot.

This result might have been justified if the residency requirement were critical to the integrity of the petition process and to preventing fraud and abuse. Yet whatever the original merits of the residency rule, it is now superfluous given the evolution of signature checking, as the judge explained.

No less important, the mandate undermines basic constitutional rights.

The rule is superfluous because the secretary of state, not those gathering signatures, functions as the linchpin in ensuring the validity of signatures. And that office now leaves nothing to chance: It checks all petition signatures against a statewide voter database.

For that matter, if petition integrity is the concern, why would anyone suppose non-state petition circulators are more likely to engage in fraud than residents? Brimmer pointedly observed, “Courts have found that the frequency of fraud by in-state and out-of-state circulators is the same.”

The judge also pointed out that the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver has recognized that “petition circulation is core political speech, because it involves interactive communication concerning political change.” Restricting such speech for anything less than a compelling state interest surely is unconstitutional.

Naturally, those signing the petition must be registered voters residing in the district where the candidate plans to run since the whole point of signatures is to demonstrate meaningful local support. But petition circulators are not part of that equation. Indeed, they are usually hired, and any enthusiasm they have for the candidate is purely accidental. No doubt that is why Brimmer has joined a majority of federal courts in ruling against residency rules for petition circulators, including a Tenth Circuit opinion involving non-partisan ballot measures.

And the damage to free speech goes further. Not only had the residency rule nullified the speech of hundreds of registered Republicans who signed a petition to place Lamborn on the ballot, it threatened, as Lamborn’s motion for a preliminary injunction maintained, to “deny all Republican and unaffiliated voters in the district the opportunity to re-elect a Congressman who has represented the District since 2006. It is hard to imagine a more serious violation of the core First Amendment right of political association.”

And it is hard to imagine a more fitting statute for a judge to reject.