The Colorado secretary of state’s office sent postcards to dead people and noncitizens, urging them to register to vote.
“I don’t know where they’re harvesting names from but (they’re) doing it without obviously doing any kind of check,” one woman, Karen Anderson, told a local CBS affiliate.
Anderson said she received one of the postcards that was addressed to her mother.
“Which sounds really nice except my mother has been dead four years, and she hasn’t lived, voted, owned property, worked, or done anything other than visit Colorado since 1967.”
“You hear about them trying to register dead people, but I never really thought I’d see it,” she added.
The CBS affiliate learned of a dozen instances of the postcards being sent to people who can’t vote, including a British citizen, a deceased woman, six migrant workers, and a man from Lebanon.
“How many went out that nobody called in about it?” Anderson added.
Secretary of State Jena Griswold addressed CBS Denver’s reporting on the issue on Sunday, after the outlet deleted its initial story from its site, to confirm and clarify that a third-party organization compiled the list of where postcards were sent.
Griswold said that the mailing list came from the Electronic Registration Information Center and clearly stated the qualifications to vote.
“I think the key is that the mailing to encourage potentially unregistered people to register is not the same mailing as our ballot mailing,” Griswold said. “Those are two separate universes. When we send you a ballot or the county clerk sends out a ballot, those are to people who are registered. This postcard, encouraging people to register, goes to people who are potentially eligible but unregistered, and you know, the mailings aren’t always 100% correct.”
“The fact that the list, or the postcard, goes to a few people who are not eligible to be registered is why we put so prominently on the postcard the qualifications to vote in this election,” she added.
The postcards were sent to about 750,000 people, and Griswold expects 10% of the recipients will register to vote.
The news comes after multiple reports of mail, including ballots, being discovered in the trash or thrown out somewhere else, or ballots containing wrong voting information.
In Wisconsin, three trays of mail, including absentee ballots, were discovered in a ditch last week. In Virginia, 1,000 duplicate ballots were sent to voters. In Michigan, the secretary of state’s office misprinted a voting section on ballots for troops overseas, which omitted Vice President Mike Pence’s name.
Editor’s note: This piece was updated to reflect some recipients were noncitizens of the United States, not illegal immigrants.
