Let’s hope some 30,000 people who aren’t eligible to vote – and aren’t even U.S. citizens – don’t wind up voting anyway in Colorado’s election this fall. As reported in Monday’s Gazette, they were encouraged to register by official postcards they received in error in the mail.

State officials now are offering assurances they won’t allow any unauthorized ballots to be cast. Then again, it was the state government itself – ironically, Colorado’s secretary of state, who oversees state elections – that had sent each of the noncitizens the mailer by mistake.

Even if the incident doesn’t turn out to pose an imminent security threat to the upcoming election, it does leave a cloud over procedures at the Secretary of State’s Office as well as some of the permissive voter-registration policies that tripped it up.

The slip-up couldn’t come at a worse time for first-term Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who is seeking re-election on this fall’s ballot against her widely respected GOP challenger, former Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson. Griswold has campaigned almost nonstop since winning her seat in 2018 on boasts about Colorado’s “gold standard” election system.

This week, Griswold’s office issued a statement explaining the mishap. Department employees had compared a list of names of 102,000 people provided by the Electronic Registration Information Center – a national group focused on voter registration – to a database of Colorado residents issued driver’s licenses. The organization’s list included residents who had been issued special licenses for those who are not U.S. citizens. But it didn’t include formatting information that could have enabled Griswold’s office to eliminate those names before the mailers went out.

As also noted in The Gazette’s report, Colorado is among at least 18 states that issue driver’s licenses to non-U.S. citizens, and our state also automatically registers eligible voters when they obtain their driver’s license from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Even if Colorado’s mail-balloting process is itself secure, as Griswold’s office and local county clerks contend, the embarrassing episode does raise questions anew about the state’s aggressive efforts to register voters in the first place. For those bent on fraud, the let’s-register-voters-at-all-costs approach invites it.

Now, even as Griswold’s office insists no one who wrongly received the Sept. 7 mailing has attempted to vote, so far, it has to do double-duty cleaning up the mess. It is sending notices to the postcard recipients who received the postcards. And it is taking extra steps to reject anyone ineligible to vote from registering. The office says it is comparing Social Security numbers on each application, on a daily basis.

It all ought to serve as a reminder to Griswold to train her sights on her job – for a change. In her four years in office, Griswold has become a parody of the perpetually self-promoting politician. Anyone involved in Colorado politics or media almost has to unplug from the internet to escape the reach of her publicity mill.

She has routinely hyper-politicized the one statewide elected office that is supposed to rise above party politics in order to maintain the faith of the electorate. Griswold gets down in the mud with her regular diatribes against Republicans and her public stands on issues like abortion-rights that have nothing to do with her office.

She has debased and arguably neglected her office as she pines publicly for some higher one. In that light, this week’s pratfall seems almost inevitable.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board