"I don't know for sure right now," Gessler says. "Everyone agrees that non-citizens shouldn't be voting. We're looking at options.... I don't want to commit myself. But this is a problem that still cries out for a solution — for a better solution than we've had in the past."
Denise Maes, who has been watching Gessler closely from her post as public-policy director of the ACLU of Colorado, says that the secretary of state should not have squandered so many resources on this project. "I obviously question his motives, but I also question his priorities in office," she notes.
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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If there are administrative flaws in the way that people sign up to vote in Colorado that result in non-citizens being on the rolls, then those flaws should be fixed, she says, but not with the fear tactics Gessler has used. "Is 'fraud' an appropriate word to use?" she asks.
But Gessler points out that his critics' arguments have evolved to match his research. "The argument against me is, 'There's no problem, no problem at all.' Then I identify a problem. Then the argument is, 'Well, there's not enough of a problem,' which becomes very, very difficult for people to sustain," he says.
In September, as the controversy over his anti-fraud work continued to simmer, Gessler launched a $1.1 million registration campaign with television, radio, print and online ads in English and Spanish. And by October 9, the deadline to register to vote, more than 3.6 million voters had signed up in this state — a more than 10 percent jump in registrations from 2008, a rate that outpaced the state's population growth. Gessler says this increase can be traced to his ad campaign and to targeted mailers sent to eligible, but not registered, voters. Colorado was also a national leader with its web-optimized, online voter-registration platform, he adds; no other state had this kind of system in place.
And Colorado had a notable jump in turnout on November 6 — about 172,000 more voters than in 2008. Gessler also points to an 11 percent surge in participation from military and overseas voters — an increase he attributes to his new electronic ballot delivery system. While detractors say that much of this success can be traced to the presidential campaigns in swing states, Gessler insists that Colorado's improvements in registration and turnout exceeded those of some other battleground states with comparable campaign activity, such as Florida and Ohio.
Despite these gains, the election was not without pitfalls — minor blips from Gessler's perspective, but major snafus in the eyes of voter-rights groups. From September 14 to 24, for example, the registrations of Coloradans who used the mobile-optimized version of GoVoteColorado.com were not recorded due to a technical glitch. About 800 people may have mistakenly thought they'd registered successfully; Gessler's office had no way of identifying or contacting them.
About two weeks later, on the final day to register to vote, the secretary of state's website crashed. Gessler's tech team brought in more servers, but on election day, the website again had problems because of high traffic.
"There was not adequate attention to that," says Colorado Common Cause's Nunez.
But Gessler says he is proud of his successes — so much so that he can't believe how much his opponents harp on the glitches.
"This is where you get the partisanship and the hypocrisy of the people who criticize me," Gessler says. "They say, 'You should be focused on getting people to register to vote,' and so I do it, and I do it in a way that no one has ever done in the history of Colorado and...what do they say? Nothing! Nothing! They pretend it didn't happen."
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Scott Gessler is running for re-election in 2014. At least that's his plan for now. A reporter once tricked him into saying he might launch a campaign to try to unseat Democratic governor John Hickenlooper, he says, but he insists that he wants to keep his secretary of state seat for another term. "I've got a great record to run on," he says.
While Democrats look for someone to run against him, Colorado Ethics Watch is taking another approach altogether. A report the group published in September argues that the secretary of state's office should be non-partisan, and that would require a major reorganization of how elections are run. According to Ethics Watch's Toro, some states do this well — with either a nonpartisan director of elections who is appointed, or an independent, bipartisan commission. The secretary of state could just become a cabinet post charged with watching Colorado's business operations, he suggests.
"The secretary of state position has become a political football and a prize to be won, with the reward being your side gets to set the rules for the next election," Toro says. "To me, that's not how democracy should work."
But according to Gessler, the current system is clearly working in Colorado — and the investigations are just proof of the checks and balances.
Gessler fully expects to be exonerated in both cases. If the state's Independent Ethics Commission finds him guilty, though, the punishment would be a censure and a fine — neither one a huge obstacle to his re-election. But Toro says that if the Denver district attorney finds evidence of wrongdoing in his spending records, Gessler could face criminal charges ranging from a Class One misdemeanor to a Class Five felony of embezzlement of public funds, an offense that would bar him from holding public office.
