Last week, the League of Women Voters of the Pikes Peak Region kicked off a three-part podcast on voter integrity that’s well worth your time and reflection, “Making Democracy Work.”

The host is league spokeswoman Shelly Roehrs, an agent with Blue Picket Realty in the Springs, who asks questions aimed at informing and not inflaming voters. She’s very good, and she notes the league is made up of “cool” community leaders. I agree.

The goal is to make voters more engaged by equipping them with information. Of course, these days anyone who doesn’t buy your doctrine whole hog must be your enemy. Ain’t that America.

It’s available on Studio809podcasts.com or most any podcast platform, including Amazon Music, Apple Podcast and Spotify. Go to Studio809, however, if for no other than you’ll dig its tagline, “This is what community sounds like,” especially if you’re exhausted with your community sounding angry and manipulated.

The podcast’s analysis starts out local, too, taking on the question of why El Paso County conducted a second election audit.

The races there were not in question or even close; President Donald Trump beat Democrat Joe Biden 54% to 43%, and every Republican incumbent breezed into another term.

Republican leaders in El Paso County take the view that more information is better information, and the rest of the state is or should be watching, according to the debut podcast.

The information is local voters have no reason to doubt that their vote was counted correctly.

Chuck Broerman, the chief election official, told the County Commission on May 18 that that ClearAudit reviewed the tabulations from the vilified LoDo vendor Dominion Voting Systems and “found from their independent, third-party audit that the auditor’s results were very close to the actual results we saw on our present system here in El Paso County.” 

That reassurance cost taxpayers about $45,000.

County clerks are dealing with a spate of requests from dissatisfied, presumably Trump, supporters to take another look at the ballots, which, of course, supports the narrative that something is officially amiss in perception if not fact.

Broomfield, El Paso, Pueblo and Weld counties are reportedly making the votes, sans identifying information, free to the public to reexamine until their heart’s content. Other counties are setting a much higher price from those using public resources and time to pursue their suspicions.

The guest is Harvie Branscomb, a longtime election quality activist, blogger and “US foreign policy critic” who loves “progressive grassroots.”

“I think money spent on elections, including for auditing, is well-spent,” he told Roehrs. “I wouldn’t be concerned about the amount of money spent. In fact we’re starving our elections about financing. We definitely need to spend more money on elections.”

Branscomb said state legislators are always trying to make elections cost less. “That’s not the right thing to do.”

Republicans seem anxious to make them cost more, but on the back end, not the front.

In the last legislative session, Republicans tried, in vain, to make it easier for regular voters to ask for recounts and to create a commission to set election audit guidelines. 

Both died on March 29 in the Democratic-led House State, Civic, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee, which is perennially known as the Kill Committee, where minority party bills go to die.

The issues on the initial blast of podcasts, which each last 32 minutes, include election fraud and the 2020 election, the Jan. 6 insurrection and politics in general.

The podcast also talks about diversity in the league.

That makes this a good place to disclose I’m a former member of the League of Women Voters in Alabama. I gave a speech at one of their meetings and they were kind enough to ask me to join. Debbie Elliott, the national correspondent for NPR, was already a member. She lived in Orange Beach, and I lived across the same county in Fairhope.

“You don’t have to be a woman,” I was told. “You just have to be fair.”

Fair is implicit promise in every byline I produce, so it felt right to join.

Moreover, where anyone stands on voter integrity is more than likely based on their voter registration these days, and when the answer is predictable the question is pointless, and that’s the shape of our democracy.

The 101-year-old league’s mission is “Empowering Voters. Defending Democracy.” 

The league nationally is 101 years old, founded by the National American Woman Suffrage Association six months before the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women the right to vote.

The Pikes Peak chapter has been around since 1937, coincidentally the same year Berthoud Pass became Colorado’s first formal ski area.

We need the unbiased middle to flourish like outdoor recreation. There’s a thing we used to say in my league chapter: politics is not a spectator sport.

As states rewrite election laws based on voter fraud that’s never been proven, both sides need reasoned information on which to make their own decisions, instead of basing their views on which side shouts the loudest.