Coloradans face first big, brawling, unpredictable primary
It happened so quietly, so painlessly, we can be forgiven for not noticing the change at all. The government bureaucracy worked.
Think about that.
About a year ago, the Colorado Secretary of State’s office began registering eligible voters automatically when they applied for or renewed their driver’s licenses at the Department of Motor Vehicles offices.
It was not mandatory. Anyone who wanted to boycott democracy could opt not to be registered. But no additional effort was required for eligible voters to get on the rolls.
The new registration system was designed to be convenient, accurate, cost-effective and to encourage broader participation in elections.
All I can say is congratulations. It’s about time.
Colorado has joined 11 other states and the District of Columbia – and countries all over the world – in implementing the automatic voter registration process.
“The rationale is to make it easy for people to vote in Colorado,” said Secretary of State Wayne Williams. “It’s something I’ve been working to do since I took office.”
At 87 percent, Colorado has the highest registration rate for eligible voters in the country, but that still leaves 13 percent of voters unregistered. When elections are decided by tiny margins, which seems to be happening more frequently, mobilizing a few thousand potential voters is crucial, so we can expect to see advocacy groups continuing to do the kind of targeted voter registration campaigns we’ve all seen since forever.
Young people, Latinos, African-americans and other groups who often don’t have driver’s licenses and traditionally have low voter turnout rates will still be host to registration drives in their communities.
The state also is preregistering parolees so when they complete their sentences, they are automatically registered to vote. Many convicted felons don’t realize that their voting rights are restored upon parole in Colorado, so preregistration seamlessly eliminates the confusion.
Williams said he is shooting for 100 percent registration, which almost seems within reach.
While the new system makes registration much simpler for voters, it’s also a whole lot easier for state and local elections officials, Williams said. The data management systems are not so clunky and the constant updating of addresses needed to maintain accurate voter registration files is much easier when the systems can communicate. “We’re a mail ballot state, so keeping addresses updated is critical,” Williams said.
These changes along with the passage of Proposition 108 in 2016, which allows unaffiliated voters to participate in primaries for the first time, are making this year’s primary elections bigger, broader and impossible to predict.
More Colorado voters are registered unaffiliated than for either the Democratic or Republican parties, so the pool of primary voters includes a whole lot of folks who refuse to toe a party line.
The candidates don’t know how to appeal to these renegades, yet they know they’re likely to determine the outcomes. This is why they’re spending even more money than usual this year and why the candidates with the most cash have the most swagger.
They figure they can pound stubborn voters into submission with relentless advertising via TV, social media and direct mail. With a month to go before the primary, the blitzkrieg already has begun, and with the local news media on life support, there’s little capacity to truth-test the messages.
But maybe all those newly minted primary election voters will prove themselves to be truly independent and evaluate candidates on something more than the intensity of the commercial bombardment. With the heightened engagement on national political trends, even the cynics among us are poised to expect the unexpected on June 26.
In all fairness, though, nobody knows, and the pollsters, chastened by their miserable performance in 2016, are loath to say anything that could be confused with a forecast.
So, hey, here’s to Wayne Williams and the bureaucracy, and here’s to the fickle finger of fate. Power to the people.
This will be fun.