It seems that Mike Coffman of Colorado is doing his best to hand his congressional seat over to the Blue column, but for those not familiar with Mr. Coffman, he is not just a birther caught with a live microphone.
Mike Coffman was Colorado's former Secretary of State before running for Congress.
And in 2008, when politicos thought Colorado could have been one of the deciding states in the election, Mike Coffman did his very best to try to become the Katherine Harris of the 2008 election.
Let's go back to that year in this diary:
At Issue: Forms used by Voter Registration Drives. They include a place for people to include their Driver's License Number, State ID Card Number or Social Security Number (only requires last 4 digits). There is a box present which states "I do not have a Colorado Driver's license or Dept. of Revenue identification number" which people are supposed to mark if they are going to only give an SSN.
The Secretary of State has included in his Rules (dated July 2008) that any new voter who does not mark that box and only gives their SSN shall not be registered to vote. In mid-September he issued a memo to the County Clerks telling them specifically to not register anyone who does this.
Coffman issued this ruling that said that people who did not check a small box would not be registered to vote.
This was in late July of 2008 -- after voter registration drives had turned in tens of thousands of first time newly registered voters -- many were from the group I was working with at the time.
After this, the New York Times found Coffman's office were purging thousands from the voter rolls, far exceeding the number of people who died or moved out of the state.
Also, during the election year, Colorado Ethics Watch discovered through filed motions, that:
Coffman's State Elections Director was discovered to be staying at a loft owned by the software salesman who manages the Voting Machines (DIEBOLD) for our state, machines that have already been de-certified, then re-certified by Coffman. She resigned pending an investigation, and it calls into question the veracity of our voting machine process.
and was also accused of doing this:
Mike Coffman broke the law last year by allowing his database manager Dan Kopelman to manage the database while he was running a Republican voter database company on the side.
Mike Coffman was sued for openly disenfranchised voters by voter purges, used onerous rules to attempt to disqualify newly registered voters, had his state election director's living arrangements being paid for by DIEBOLD, and, had his database manager running a partisan Republican voter database company while managing the supposedly non partisan voter database of Colorado.
Incidentally, Coffman ran for his congressional seat that year in 2008, using voting machines he approved and in which his office counted the votes for that district.
Mike Coffman may be a birther, but he is no dummy, and has shown in his past decisions as Secretary of State that he worked very hard to try to prevent people from voting for Barack Obama in 2008 in Colorado.
Oh, and by the way, the Democrat running against him is Joe Miklosi -- and guess what he did before he ran for office?
He worked for Progressive Majority helping elect local Democrats to office in Colorado.
Joe Miklosi's campaign has a petition to 'stop hiding' from reporters on his 'un-American' comments on President Obama.