Friday, October 15, 2004

Colorado Water The State budget crisis is creating problems for Colorado's water protection programs, according to the Denver Post [October 15, 2004, "State water protection at risk"]. From the article, "Under a flagging state economy, the legislature last year stripped more than $2 million a year from the health department's Water Quality Control Division. That cut was needed to meet requirements of the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, or TABOR. Consequently, the water quality agency was forced to rely on federal grants. The agency also sharply increased fees on polluters and levied new fees on drinking water providers. But the agency faces a June 2005 sunset of the bill that allowed it to assess those fees." 6:56:44 AM

2004 Presidential Election Early voting starts Monday in Colorado. I'm looking for a listing of locations. Howard Dean was in Colorado yesterday urging voters to vote early, according to the Denver Post [October 15, 2004, "Vote early, Dean urges local Dems"]. From the article, "Voters should not wait until Election Day, said Dean, who is traveling across the country to support Kerry and also candidates backed by Democracy for America, the political action committee that emerged from the ashes of the Dean campaign. He urged people at the rally to start voting Monday, when the state's early-voting period begins. 'It's not enough for you to go out and vote,' he said. 'You'd better drag six or eight friends. And it doesn't start Nov. 2. It starts Monday.'" The lawsuit over Amendment 36's effective date is attracting more supporters, according to the Rocky Mountain News [October 15, 2004, "Amendment 36 suit brings out lawyers"]. From the article, "Amendment 36 backers and two of Colorado's presidential electors jumped Thursday into a federal lawsuit challenging the measure's effective date. Colorado U.S. District Judge Lewis Babcock scheduled a hearing on the case for Oct. 26 - just a week before the Nov. 2 election. The judge said he first must decide if he has legal jurisdiction over the issue - the contention that making Amendment 36, if it passes, effective on Election Day is unfair. Amendment 36 would change Colorado's constitution to split the state's nine electoral votes for president proportionally, based on the popular vote, rather than winner-takes-all. If passed, if becomes effective immediately." Electoral-vote.com: "Survey USA ran polls in 14 states and 21 cities to see who won the third debate. Kerry won in NY, NJ, ME, CA, OR,WA, IL, AR, PA, and CO. Bush won in TX, KY, and OK. Florida, as usual, was a tie. Among cities, Kerry won in 8 and Bush won in 12. When we look at cities in swing states, the mix is Kerry won St. Louis, Detroit, Las Vegas, Tucson, and Cleveland. Bush won Phoenix, Cincinnati, Des Moines, and Grand Rapids. When broken down by party, in all 35 areas, the Democrats thought Kerry won and the Republicans thought Bush won." "Not much change due to the state polls today, although it looks like Arkansas is getting a bit closer. Excepting Florida, I doubt Kerry will win any states in the South though. Florida and the Midwest is where the big action is." "All in all, the race is much closer than it now appears. If you add up the strong and weak numbers in the legend, you get Kerry at 198 and Bush at 222. If you then award Kerry New Jersey, which nobody except Strategic Vision thinks is even close, the score is Kerry 213, Bush 222. The rest are tossups. Many people have asked me to toss out Strategic Vision, but to stay impartial, I don't want to cherry pick among the pollsters." Keving Drum takes on the Swiftboat kids. Kick 'em Kevin! Update: Taegan Goddard: "'America's military service men and women and their families are convinced that the country is going in the right direction, like George W. Bush much more than the civilian population does, support the war in Iraq more strongly and are more positive about the economy,' the National Annenberg Election Survey shows." "'The Pentagon is making intense efforts to get troops on active duty to vote this year, and 94 percent of the military sample said they intended to vote in the presidential election, compared to 85 percent of the civilian population.'" 85%? Here are the Voter Turnout numbers from 2000. Update: Here's a reminder to voters, especially IT types that know about the technology. John Ashcroft's Department of Justice architected a cave in to Microsoft. If you're sitting on the fence this should be one of your major concerns. Update: Taegan Goddard: "President Bush 'opened a four-point lead' -- 48% to 44% -- on Sen. John Kerry yesterday, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Friday. 'An improvement in Bush's showing among undecideds and a strong response from his base Republican supporters helped fuel the president's rise.' The Rasmussen tracking poll shows Bush leading 49% to 45.5%. The TIPP Tracking Poll shows Bush leading 47% to 44%." Update: TalkLeft: "Call to Ralph Nader: Leave the race." 6:47:43 AM

Denver November 2004 Election The Rocky Mountain News is investigating the allegations of voter fraud here in Colorado [October 15, 2004, "Faulty voter applications are blamed on workers"]. From the article, "Sneaky voter-drive employees are to blame for submitting hundreds of faulty registration applications in Colorado, said an official with the nonprofit organization that mobilized the effort. These workers were able to thwart the drive's system of checks and balances, said Jim Fleischmann, regional coordinator of the voting registration effort of the Association of Community Organization for Reform Now, commonly known as ACORN." Bill Johnson puts the alleged voter fraud into context in his column in today's Rocky Mountain News [October 15, 2004, "Johnson: Davidson's rhetoric calls for a little reality check"]. He writes, "It isn't until much later in the newspaper stories that you learn that she and county clerks across Colorado have turned up maybe 1,000 instances of "questionable" voter-registration irregularities, which she has turned over to state Attorney General Ken Salazar. One thousand? Excuse me? What I did next was part of that educational/sanity check. I pulled up an earlier story that said more than 300,000 new voters registered to participate in the Nov. 2 presidential election, half doing so in the past 30 days." Colorado Luis "So what does Donetta Davidson do? Well naturally, she schedules a closed door meeting with lawyers for the Bush-Cheney campaign to talk about the rules for the upcoming election -- some of which have yet to be issued by her office. Meanwhile, the Republicans, desperate to take attention away from the growing fraud scandal in Nevada, where voter registration circulators associated with the Republican National Committee are accused of destroying hundreds of registration forms where the voter marked "Democrat" as their party preference, are willfully misconstruing a Colorado Kerry-Edwards campaign publication as calling for false claims of voter intimidation. (When the Rocky Mountain News is relying on the Drudge Report for a story, you know the Republicans are getting desperate.)" Westword, as always, asks the tough questions of Peter Coors and Ken Salazar. 6:35:58 AM

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