Bob Balink up to his usual voter scare tactics

If there's one thing Bob Balink, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder, is good at it's scaring the white male majority here and raising the specter of hoards of illegal brown people voting. He's been at it again recently but is taken to task in the Gazette by some brave local citizens:

Proof of citizenship would threaten voting rights

Voters should be alarmed by El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Bob Balink’s proposal that people registering to vote provide proof of citizenship. Although showing proof of citizenship might sound reasonable at first glance, such policies have only one effect: suppressing the constitutional voting rights of American citizens, especially the elderly and minorities and those with low incomes. Many people simply don’t have their birth certificate, which can be very difficult to obtain for people with limited resources.

Recent studies, such as those conducted by the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law, have explored the questions of who has proof of citizenship and whether voter fraud by noncitizens is a problem that threatens election integrity in the United States.

The studies found that 7 percent — or more than 13 million Americans — do not have ready access to the documents that can definitively prove citizenship: a birth certificate, naturalization papers or a U.S. passport. Not surprisingly, the studies also found that those who most often lack proof of citizenship are poor, elderly or from racial and ethnic minority groups.

Furthermore, studies show that requiring proof of citizenship appears to do nothing to ensure election integrity while negatively impacting civic participation. In Arizona, for instance, the only state that currently requires proof of citizenship, 35 percent of new registrants in the most populous county were rejected in 2005, and 17 percent were rejected between January and September 2006. Most are presumed to be legal citizens who did not have the required documents.

We write on behalf of a coalition of local civic-minded organizations that believe the rights of so many legal citizens should not be sacrificed when there’s not one single documented case of a non-citizen attempting to register and vote in the state of Colorado — much less El Paso County.

The right to vote is a cornerstone of democracy. Our elected county clerk and recorder should be in the business of defending that right, not creating barriers for legal voters. The current system of verifying voter citizenship by way of sworn affidavit is working. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we ask Balink to shelve this discriminatory proposal.

Rosemary Harris
President, Colorado Springs Branch NAACP

Barb Ferrill Van Hoy
Executive Director, Citizens Project

Clerk Balink started this crap right before the elections in 2006. He's starting earlier this time. Maybe he just wants the word out that you better be able to prove citizenship. That should be enough to help out some Republicans running against Dems in tight local races.

The voting age citizens of El Paso county should let Bob know now if you have absolute, positive proof of your citizenship. Bob's the one who counts the votes, and you know what Stalin said about that.