Onetime state GOP chair, conservative stalwart and talk-radio host Steve Curtis – charged in March with voter fraud and forgery in Weld County for allegedly casting his ex-wife’s mail-in ballot in last November’s election – will go to trial Dec. 4.

The Greeley Tribune’s James Redmond reports Curtis pleaded not guilty in District Court in Greeley Wednesday to one count of voter fraud and one count of forgery, a class five felony. He could go to prison for up the three years if convicted.

By way of recap, here’s Denver’s Fox 31-TV at the time of Curtis’s first court appearance on the charges in March:

Weld County Prosecutors discovered the forgery when (former wife) Kelly Curtis called the Weld County Elections Office in October asking how she could vote since she had just moved to South Carolina but was still registered to vote in Colorado.

That’s when she said an election worker told her she had already voted by mail, and the elections office already had her ballot.

…verification judges for the Weld County Clerk and Recorder’s Office got involved.  “We compared her (ballot) signature just to the signatures on her registration,” said Weld County Clerk and Recorder Carly Koppes, who quickly determined the signatures didn’t match but noted the the ballot was sent from Steve Curtis’s home in Firestone, Colo.

He was allowed to remain free following his initial court appearance in Greeley March 21.

Curtis was chair of the state GOP from 1997 to 1999, a tenure marred by infighting that pitted his hardline, pro-life wing of the state party against more moderate elements that included then-Gov. Bill Owens.

As we’ve noted before, Curtis, a vocal death-penalty advocate during his years at the party’s helm, had been a victim in a grisly homicide in 1989 at his southeast Denver home. He was shot and left for dead alongside a roommate who was killed.

Curtis was a talk-radio host on Denver’s KLZ-560 AM radio at the time he was charged last March, but a staffer at the station confirmed today his show no longer is in the station’s lineup.