Defeating Mike Coffman is a COLORADO PRIORITY!

Defeating Mike Coffman is a Colorado Priority!
(Cross posted on Square State)

I will never forget piling my team of college students, political activists and stay-at-home Moms into my mini-van, dropping each one of them off at a different spot in Arapahoe County, then standing outside all day in the hot sun outside Ross Department store at the Towne Center of Aurora. We were MoveOn voter registration staffers in the summer of 2008, determined to hang out in every conceivable place we could to find young people and minority members to register. We spent our days and some evenings at unemployment offices, train stations, bus stations, social services buildings, college libraries, skateboard parks, rock concerts... you name it. I never had a better tan than I did last summer, and I am proud to say I personally registered about 1000 great new voters, most of whom were motivated by the sheer privilege of electing someone named Barack Hussein Obama to be President of the United States.

Every day I was asked the same question when registering voters, which usually went like this, "I don't own a car. I take public transportation, so I don't carry a driver's license, and it is safer to keep it at home. The instructions on this registration form say, 'Check here if you have a driver's license. If you do not have one, use your social security number.' If I own a driver's license but keep it at home, what should I do?"

Every time someone from MoveOn called to ask the Secretary of State Mike Coffman's office how to handle this question, we were told regestrants could put their social security number alone, without checking the box, since the person did actually own a driver's license -- they just didn't have it with them. Sometimes we were instructed to have the person put a driver's license number down in addition to their social security number, "just in case".

You can imagine my disgust, frustration and rage every time I turned on the news at election time to hear how then-Secretary of State, Mike Coffman was making his best attempts to invalidate our thousands of voter registrations. People who did not follow the (misleading, ambiguous) instructions on the form exactly, were being purged, his office said. The newspaper said they were purging voters for not checking the box, or for putting both their driver's license and their social security numbers on the same form. "Don't blame us, Mr. Washington, Ms. Hernandez, and Mrs. Wong, rules is rules", they seemed to say. Each time I saw this, I screamed at my television, vowing to work tirelessly on the campaign of anyone who ever ran against Mike Coffman for political office.

Fast forward to February of 2008. I heard two candidates threw their hats into the ring to run against now-Congressman of congressional district 6, Mike Coffman. During the next few weeks, I spent hours with each candidate, getting to know them both well, trying to determine which had the better resume to defeat Congressman and acquitted vote purger, Mike Coffman. I studied election results from the last four cycles, studied demographics in CD 6 from Congressional Quarterly, and talked to people on the previous opponent's campaign team. Having been a precinct chair and resident of CD 6 for 18 years, I know what voters in my district want, and how they think. Wild horses will not stop us from defeating Mike Coffman from his next political victory in Colorado. When Democrats are done with Mike Coffman in 2010, he will be playing checkers with Dick Cheney at Shady Acres retirement center.
Wherever you live in CO, please join us in defeating Mike Coffman in Congressional District 6, for the good of Colorado, and for the good of the United States of America. It is our duty to stand up for democracy and send a message to every Secretary of State across this nation that voter registration purging will not be tolerated. Please donate generously to the ActBlue Congressional District 6 committee. Your money will go to the candidate who wins the Democratic Primary. http://www.actblue.com/entity/...

Oh, and who am I supporting? More on that, later!