Amid GOP challenges to voting rights across the country, Colorado House Democrats killed three election-related Republican bills on Monday that, Democrats say, were wasteful, anti-democratic, or both.
“Colorado Republicans are stuck on the Big Lie and are using it to restrict voting rights in our state. We won’t let them,” state Rep. Steven Woodrow (D-Denver) said in a press release from the Colorado House Democrats.
The proposed measures – introduced by GOP state Reps. Mark Baisley of Roxborough Park, Andres Pico of Colorado Springs and Ron Hanks of Cañon City – stemmed from the unfounded claims of voter fraud that arose amid the 2020 presidential election.
In their opening remarks, Baisley and Hanks parroted the misleading rhetoric and debunked election-conspiracy narratives that Republican officials such as Donald Trump have promoted over the past few years, saying they were responding to constituents’ concerns about election integrity.
“[There is] nothing more basic, nothing more frankly important, to everything else that follows what we do here, than for the voters to be able to trust that those of us elected were the ones that were elected,” Baisley said in his opening remarks at a hearing before the House State, Civic, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee on Monday afternoon. “It’s a sacred process, but it needs to start off with the trust that everyone can count on the results of that vote.”
Hanks, a known election conspiracist and participant in the Jan. 6 insurrection, baselessly claimed that investigations in numerous states, including ones “using many of the same voting equipment and methods as Colorado,” had revealed significant numbers of fraudulent and duplicate votes in the 2020 presidential election. He said he had firsthand knowledge of the issue from attending the two audits conducted in Arizona.
“[My perspective] is not reliant on media that has largely ignored or distorted the results of that Arizona audit,” Hanks said. “Whereas the mainstream media has bothered only to report the final tally of votes, thousands of which were fraudulent and which added a few hundred votes to Biden’s total, the truth was quite different, and it was evident.”
Baisley’s bill, the first to be introduced at the hearing, would have required Colorado to adopt federal voting systems standards. Some of these federal standards are less stringent than Colorado’s existing standards, and the state would be forced to buy new and untested voting systems, Democrats responded in their news release.
The second bill, co-sponsored by Pico and Republican state Sen. Dennis Hisey of Fountain, called for Coloradans ineligible for jury duty to be removed from voter rolls.
Colorado already has processes in place to pull ineligible voters from the rolls and to update databases when voters move. The proposed policy could cause eligible voters to be wrongfully banned from voting, say opponents.
Finally, Hanks’ proposed bill sought to require ballots to be produced with anti-counterfeit technologies such as holographic foil, watermarks, and invisible ink. This measure could needlessly increase the cost of ballot production, according to Democrats.
During a hearing on the bills Monday, the GOP representatives were unable to produce evidence or data to justify the need for their proposed bills, even when directly questioned by committee members.
Experts in law enforcement, intelligence, and the military, as well as U.S. officials, testified that the 2020 election was the “most secure in U.S. history” and that there was no evidence of foreign interference, widespread voter fraud nor significant flaws in voting systems, according to the Colorado Secretary of State website.
Colorado’s voting system is widely considered to be secure, by Republicans and Democrats alike.
According to Hilary Rudy, Deputy Elections Director for the Secretary of State’s office, the state already employs numerous security measures such as ballot tracking, signature verification, ballot layout and envelope control, and bipartisan audits to ensure the integrity of each election.
“We are proud to have such robust election security protocols here in Colorado,” Rudy said in a witness testimony at Monday’s committee meeting. “These systems have been painstakingly designed to ensure that only one vote is counted per voter.”
