The Colorado Secretary of State is under fire after mailing postcards to dead people and non-citizens, urging them to go online and register to vote. According to CBS4, at least a dozen people are confirmed as receiving the postcards who shouldn't have - while the number of unconfirmed erroneous mailings is of course unknown.
"Which sounds really nice except my mother has been dead four years and she hasn’t lived, voted, owned property, worked, or done anything other than visit Colorado since 1967," said resident Karen Anderson - who opened her mail about a week ago and found one of the postcards addressed to her mother.
Anderson wonders "how many went out that nobody called in about," noting that the State of Colorado even issued her mother's death certificate.
CBS4 has learned of about a dozen people who received the postcards who shouldn’t have. They went to a deceased woman in Las Animas County, six migrant workers in Otero County, a Canadian in Douglas County, a man from Lebanon in Jefferson County, and a British citizen in Arapahoe County.
Colorado Director of the Secretary of State's elections division, Judd Choate, said the state goes to 'great lengths' to ensure the accuracy of the state's voter rolls, however there are always mistakes.
"Colorado does virtually every single possible thing it can do reasonably to clean its voter rolls," he said, adding that the list they use for the postcards is compiled by the National Electronic Registration Information System - which uses data from the DMV, national and state death records, voter rolls in other states, and change of address forms. He says his office then performs a second vetting.
"Yes, it’s true that occasionally it will go to a person that it shouldn’t go to, someone who’s already registered or somebody that’s below the age of 18, but the vast, vast majority go to the people who are eligible and then many of them follow-up and become registered voters and they get their ballot in the mail and can vote in our election," said Choate - who added that postcards were mailed to around 750,000 people, of which he expects maybe 10% to register.
"You hear about them trying to register dead people but I never really thought I’d see it," said Anderson.