That's not the only envelope Gessler has pushed.
In March 2011, two months after he was sworn in as Colorado Secretary of State, Scott Gessler announced that his office had compared the state's voter-registration database with driver's-license records at the Division of Motor Vehicles to determine whether it included immigrants who'd signed up to vote illegally. In Colorado, non-citizens who get driver's licenses or state IDs must prove lawful presence by showing valid immigration documents, such as a work permit or a permanent resident card. Gessler reported that there were 11,805 individuals who had used such credentials at the DMV and were also registered to vote. He was one of the first election officials across the country to conduct such a search — and that remains a source of pride for him.
Mark Manger
Scott Gessler is at home at the Colorado Secretary of State's office.
Mark Manger
Luis Toro, director of Colorado Ethics Watch.
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It remains a source of irritation for his critics. At best, they said, the search was a wild goose chase that ran counter to the office's duty to encourage voter participation. And at worst, they charged, it was a thinly veiled witch hunt tied to a national agenda to marginalize minorities and Democratic voters.
And although the number of potentially fraudulent voters has continued to shrink over the past 21 months, Gessler says he has continued to expose serious loopholes and save immigrant voters from accidental crimes. "We are actually helping people who are non-citizens, because if they vote, they are in deep trouble," he explains. "The evidence that we've seen so far shows that a lot of people are in this position through ignorance of the law." As evidence of this, his office has presented several letters and requests from immigrants who mistakenly registered to vote, asking to be removed. In some cases, immigrants checked "no" under the citizenship box but registered anyway.
Gessler insists that he has simply been going where the data takes him, without expectations and with absolutely no intention of targeting any groups.
On the basis of that data, in 2011 Gessler pushed a bill that would have given him the authority to contact those nearly 12,000 alleged non-citizens and remove the ones that his office determined were not supposed to be on the voter rolls. The bill failed. That session, Gessler also supported a voter-ID bill, similar to controversial ones making headlines in other states, but that measure failed, too.
Next, Gessler turned to the Department of Homeland Security for immigration records — another opportunity to identify illegal voters, he said. But by August 2012, over a year later, he still didn't have access to the federal data he wanted. So he sent letters to those he believed were illegally registered anyway. By then, the 12,000 or so potential non-citizens originally identified through the DMV had shrunk to 3,903; his staff says this was due to duplication errors in the first round of checks.
On August 15, Gessler asked these nearly 4,000 registered voters to prove they were citizens.
The ACLU, Colorado Common Cause, Ethics Watch and a number of other groups immediately went on the offensive. It was very plausible that someone who had showed a non-citizen record to the DMV at some point could now be a legal citizen, they said, adding that the letters would scare rightful voters.
"They are intimidating people to not bother voting," says Samantha Meiring, who was born in South Africa, moved to the U.S. in 2000 and received the letter. "I do think there is a bit of a partisan bias to it. Immigrants largely tend to vote Democratic or not Republican. Why are they targeting this particular group?"
Gessler insists that the letters were in no way intimidating, adding that those who received them merely had to offer proof if they'd since become citizens. And his staff has repeatedly said that there was no partisan motive behind the effort.
But that doesn't mean there weren't trends along party lines. Of the 3,903 voters ultimately flagged, 1,794 were unaffiliated, 1,566 were Democrats and only 486 were Republicans. That statistic fueled the fire of his opponents.
"It has nothing to do with voter fraud," says Eliseo Medina, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union. "It has more to do with politics and how to control who votes and who doesn't for partisan gain."
At the end of the summer, Gessler finally got access to the Department of Homeland Security's immigration records that fall under what's called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, program. His team found a total of 141 voters who were registered to vote but were actually immigrants, based on those federal records. Of these, Gessler said, 35 had voted in past elections and thus likely had committed fraud. Gessler's critics pointed out that 35 people amounted to about .001 percent of voters in this state — and in any case, federal officials confirm that when someone becomes a citizen, there can be a lag time in the records.
Alan Kaplan, 35 and an immigration advocate, got a letter from Gessler's office just a few weeks before election day.
Kaplan is a legal citizen and has been since 2001. Originally from Belarus, a part of the former Soviet Union, he became a citizen in 2001 through "derived citizenship," which means he was underage when his parents became citizens and was able to change his status when they got their papers. "When I got this letter, it got me thinking...not about me, per se, but about people like my grandmother, who I have to drag to vote every year," Kaplan says. "If she got a letter like this, it would not only stop her from voting this year, it would stop her from voting forever."
