While some unfairly guess at Gessler’s motive to bring uniformity to Colorado, the facts and the fundamentals favors Secretary of State Gessler in his decision to stand by the plain reading of the Colorado law requiring the mailing of absentee ballots only to active voters.  Mailing ballots to inactive voters is unnecessarily expensive and a waste of resources, as very few are ever returned.  The practice of sending a ballot to an inactive voter also provides an heightened opportunity for absentee ballot fraud where there is already an indication that the person has moved to another jurisdiction and may not be entitled to vote.  To allow the sending of ballots to addresses that are undeliverable or to inactive voters is setting the system up for abuse and, unfortunately, the next headline that undermines voter confidence.  All experts agree that the absentee ballot mailing system is already more susceptible to fraud than other
methods of voting so why would anyone want to increase the possibility of problems.  As they say an “ounce of prevention”….

Individuals are placed on inactive lists because they have not participated in elections for a lengthy period of time or have had mailings sent to them and returned as
undeliverable or with a forwarding address.  Sometimes the postal service notifies the election office that the person has moved to another jurisdiction, but the individual has not personally requested to be removed from the rolls, thus delaying any prompt list maintenance process.  These are all indications that the voter
has moved and not entitled to vote in the election.  However, their presence remains
on the voter rolls for years as dead weight, artificially inflating the true number of registered voters in
the jurisdiction.  While federal law requires inactive voters to stay dormant on the rolls for years, the high number of inactive voters on the Colorado voter rolls is a unfortunate failure of counties and the state to conduct systematic list maintenance activities.

In Colorado, it is apparent that most counties agree with Gessler’s interpretation of the statute; however, there are always one or two counties that just have to do things different by sending ballots to inactive registrants ~ they are convinced they care more, but the truth is that they are hurting more voters.  The lack of uniformity between counties is the issue that reared its head in Florida 2000.  When each county goes its own way with such issues, its always ends badly.