In an article titled "DEMS LOOK TO NEW COLORADO VOTING LAW TO SAVE SENATE foxnews.com reveals the absolute paranoia of the GOP echo chamber, low info, neo-Confederate/Tea Party mind. Author Chris Stirewalt confidently proclaims that "things aren’t looking good for the blue team in Colorado" while in the same paragraph expressing the depth of Republican insecurity over the possibility that the new Colorado voting law will enable hoards of brown, liberal heathens to vote illegally by registering on line and "with a few keystrokes create a voter and a valid ballot," (http://www.nationalreview.com/...) therefore tipping the Senate election to the Democrat, Mark Udall.
The combination of same-day registration and mail-in ballots also has many on the right worried about outright fraud [which is of course is the worst kind of fraud] in what could be a razor-thin vote to decide a razor-thin Senate majority. Even without fraud, though, Republicans have reason to worry.
Notice how Stirewalt skillfully works the "razor-thin" cliché twice in the same sentence. He also backs up the non-fraud related reason for concern by citing the latest NBC News/Marist Poll which has Gardner up by only 1% over Udall, 46% to 45%.
What Fox and the National Review fail to mention is that if you vote in person you need to bring a valid ID and if you are voting for the first time you need to produce your ID either when you registered or with your mail in ballot.
If you go to a Voter Service and Polling Center to vote in person, you will need to bring a form of ID with you. There is no photo ID requirement in Colorado. For a list of IDs that can be used to vote in Colorado, see this list.
If you are voting for the first time in Colorado and did not provide ID when you registered to vote, you will need to supply a copy of your ID with our mail ballot. In this case, your mail ballot packet will be marked to show that you need to supply an ID. See this list for acceptable forms of ID.
In his second paragraph Stirewalt justifies the sheer terror currently striking the GOP by noting that similar laws in Oregon and Washington have "helped cement those states as Democratic bastions after decades of dabbling in occasional Republicanism. Instead of having to physically take unenthusiastic voters to the polls in vans, Democrats could just catch them at home and get them to sign on the line and mail in their votes." Ah, remember the good old days of Democratic vans picking up barely conscious voters and taking them to vote? Oh, wait, if I remember correctly, Republicans didn't like that much either.
Next he makes the predictable pivot to the problem of brown voters, because after all, winning a close election with more votes than your opponent isn't really fair if it is Hispanic votes that put you over the top.
As Democrats work hard to fire up Hispanic voters with talk of a mass amnesty granted by President Obama after the election, Colorado also remains the only state on the midterm map to boast a large enough Latino population to provide an opportunity for Obama-style demographic dicing to be successful. As Democrats demonstrated in 2010 for Reid, an organizing surge can help save an incumbent down in the polls.
Where exactly is this talk of Obama granting mass amnesty coming from?--from the right wing crazies and Fox News, of course; not from Obama. And notice how Stirewalt delegitimizes Reid's 2010 victory as an "organizing surge" obviously of Hispanic voters. After insulting brown people he doesn't do himself any favors by wandering off topic into the world of women's issues. "Remember that Udall, unlike some other endangered Dems, is actually very liberal. He’s not running against the president, he’s mostly been talking about ladyparts." Here he reduces issues like equal pay for equal work, violence against women, childcare and reproductive rights to one word, which really isn't a word but rather two words. Udall has been a strong critic of Gardner's support for a personhood bill that could limit a woman's access to safe abortion but also many forms of birth control.
And then right back on topic freaking out about Democratic turnout:
But Republican operative remain very nervous that despite a new focus in the party on pushing early voting the state is just too friendly to Democratic base turnout efforts with the new law. One top GOPer told Fox News First that he thinks Garner needs to be up by more than 3 points in pre-election polls to actually pull out the win.
In his closing, Mr. Stirewalt, clumsily sums up his case while expertly revealing everything that is wrong with the Republican attitude toward voting and democracy and exposes them for what they really are, the party that needs to suppress turnout to win.
Whatever the case, the new voting regime provides Democrats unprecedented opportunities to drive turnout, even when their voters are not feeling enthusiastic. It’s one thing to have to go wait in line to vote, but quite another to just sign on the dotted line when the party canvasser comes to your door.
I thought the point of the article was to complain about the risk of fraud created by registering on line and mailing the ballot in without face to face interaction with a live person, but instead he seems to be complaining about a new voter signing on the dotted line in the presence of a real person. Maybe I'm missing something but I think Stirewalt is subconsciously concerned about newly registered voters in general, not just those registering on line and mailing their ballots.
In his article there is surprisingly little effort to address actual voter fraud, except for fleeting reference to a yet to be published study from Old Dominion University that apparently found "that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in the 2008 elections and 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterms." All this says is that a small percentage of "non-citizens" may have voted, perhaps a few hundred in a heavily Hispanic state, and without the actual publication and the actual numbers there is scarcely anything to debate, which is probably why he quickly returned to the fact that the more people who vote, especially people of color and women, the less chance Republican candidates have to win elections. Democrats consistently push laws that strive to increase voter participation, that may run the risk of a allowing few dozen questionable ballots in a state election, while Republicans promote laws that do just the opposite, to the tune of denying thousands the right to vote. If they were truly interested in promoting democracy, instead of complaining that Democrats are recruiting new voters, Republicans would be out signing up their own new voters. Of course the problem with that strategy is that the pool of recruits sympathetic to their ideology and likely to benefit from their policies is severely limited. Let's hope Republican fears are justified next week!