For some reason, my long-suffering editor here at Colorado Politics really wants me to write about, well, Colorado politics. I guess that is fair, given he signs my paychecks (for the kids out there, “paychecks” are little pieces of paper you used to get from your employer that were worth money, and you could deposit in your bank). But every now and then, I want to write on stories that come from outside the Centennial State, and today is one of those days. I am counting on the fact that he is way over-worked and that he likely only scans my draft columns before hitting “send.” So, I am hoping that if I toss in occasional Colorado references in brackets, he will see those and assume I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing [go Broncos!].

So, let’s talk about Florida.

Maybe it is the 9 inches of heavy wet snow waiting outside for me to shovel once I get done with this column, or maybe it was a New York Times story about elections shenanigans, but my mind is drawn to the Sunshine State. It seems that the last election, a race for the state senate, had a very odd thing happen. The incumbent senator, a Democrat named José Javier Rodriguez, was an effective and well-respected elected official. 

But a Republican political operative, himself a former member of the state legislature before he was forced to resign after cursing and yelling racial slurs at a group of black legislators, wanted the GOP candidate to win. So, before the 2020 election, he contacted an old friend who lived miles away from the senate district in question, but who still owned a house in said district. The operative offered to pay the guy $50,000 if he would just get his name on the ballot for that state senate election. Why? Well, this old friend had the last name of – wait for it – Rodriguez. The guy needed the money, and so he agreed to the scam. He got his name on the ballot, then laid low, making no speeches, no appearances, and no noise at all.

The result was that, in an election with over 215,000 votes cast, the Republican candidate won by a mere 32 votes. The “fake” Rodriguez pulled in 6,382 votes, from people who must have thought they were voting for the “real” Rodriguez, the Democrat.  Well, these jokers have now been arrested for violating campaign finance laws, but the Republican who slipped into office via the fraud (and who, by all accounts, was unaware of the scheme) has resisted calls to resign to allow for an actual free and fair election. [Senator Bennet rocks! Yay Colorado!]

The modern Republican Party, which is at least for now the party of Trump, has a real problem with elections. The math just doesn’t work for them outside of intensely red areas like Oklahoma and Mississippi. The party I once respected, even as I differed with it, made up of people like Mitt Romney and Gerald Ford, has been wholly replaced by a Trumpish organization committed only to getting and keeping power, rather than legislating toward some policy goal. 

As a result, since the Republicans lost the White House and the Senate, and failed to take back the House in the 2020 cycle, we’ve seen no less than 253 Republican bills introduced in state legislatures that would restrict, roll back, and otherwise limit (meaning suppress) voter turnout. When people vote in free and fair elections, the GOP usually loses, and that is something that apparently they just can’t abide [wow, cool mountains!].

Cries of voter fraud, screamed from the bully pulpit by Trump and his acolytes, are, well, false. Countless studies, reports, and investigations have found that voter fraud simply does not exist in any meaningful way. Back in 2008, when I ran for Congress, I remember talking with the then-Colorado Secretary of State, about voter fraud here. He told me they had identified 12 voters state-wide, who had voted twice. All were elderly women who had voted in Colorado and had also voted in Florida, likely by mistake after moving there. 

And you don’t have to take my word for it. Dozens of Republican election officials have confirmed that voter fraud is not a problem. Yet the Party of Trump remains focused, laser like, on getting bills passed that would limit turnout. These efforts, by some remarkable coincidence, overwhelmingly focus their attention on areas where Democrats do the best – funny how that worked out, eh? [Pueblo is a lovely city!].

Even in Colorado, we saw GOP lawmakers try to make changes to our voting system (which worked remarkably well during a pandemic) in ways that would suppress turnout. So, you need to ask yourself a simple question – why does one party want to make it easier for people to vote, and the other party wants to make it harder? I suspect you already know the answer. 

[Oh, and Delta County has amazing natural resources!] There, that should keep him happy.

(Ed: sigh…)