Reporters shouldn’t spread Gessler’s misinformation that 2013 election law set deadline in recall elections

(Read this - Promoted by Colorado Pols)

What led to the latest court ruling in two recall elections in southern Colorado is an apparent conflict between Colorado's Constitution, which gives recall candidates 15 days to qualify for the election ballot after the election date is set, and Colorado law, which gives them 10 days.

But it wasn't Colorado's new election modernization law (HB13-1303) that set the 10-day deadline.

It was actually a 2012 law, sponsored by Republican Keith King and Democrat Nancy Todd. It set the 10-day window.

Here's the relevant portion of HB12-1293 that's now on the books:

1-12-117. Nomination of successor. (1) FOR PARTISAN ELECTIONS, a candidate to succeed the officer sought to be recalled shall meet the qualifications of a party candidate or an unaffiliated candidate as provided in part 8 of article 4 of this title and shall be nominated by a political party petition or an unaffiliated petition as provided in part 9 of article 4 of this title. Nomination petitions MAY BE CIRCULATED BEGINNING THE FIRST DATE ON WHICH A PROTEST MAY BE FILED and affidavits of intent to run as a write-in candidate shall be filed no later than fifteen TEN CALENDAR days after the date on which the appropriate governing body convenes and DESIGNATED ELECTION OFFICIAL sets the election date AS PROVIDED IN SECTION1-12-111.

The Denver Post got it wrong in a Spot blog post yesterday, reporting that the new election law set the 10-day limit, and the Associated Press made the same implication in a story yesterday.

If it weren’t for the 2013 election law, county clerks would have been able to choose not to run an all-mail-in-ballot recall election, because the law mandates all-mail voting.

But they still would have had to rely on the 10-day deadline for permanent vote-by-mail voters and for absentee and overseas ballots, including ballots for military personnel. So the statutory conflict with the state constitution would have come up anyway.

In fact the problem would have arose had a recall election occurred anytime since Colorado started using mail ballots in the 1990's as ColoradoPols has pointed out yesterday, citing former GOP Secretary of State Donetta Davidson.

I can't blame reporters for being confused, however, when you have the State's top election official, Scott Gessler, spreading false information about this topic and promoting himself in the process.

On KOA's Mike Rosen show Aug. 13, Secretary of State Scott Gessler held up himself as white knight who tried to fix the 10-day-deadline problem in the election modernization bill, even though the new law isn't the cause of the problem. Listen to Gessler here @4 minutes into the recording.

Rosen: "A judge ruled that a provision of the state Constitution, that apparently only applies to a recall election, says that you only have 15 days prior to the election to turn in enough signatures to get your candidate's name on the ballot. And the lawsuit brought by the Libertarians says instead they were given only 10 days after the Governor set the election date…It's a little confusing, since the Constitution conflicts with election-reform legislation passed in the last session. Now it all lands back in Secretary of State Scott Gessler's lap… I gave a brief summary. Put some more details on it. "

Gessler: "Well, your summary is pretty accurate. We had tried to harmonize the statute and the Constitution. Ironically, I was very much opposed to the legislation that went through last year but found myself in the position where I had to defend it…."

Rosen: "How about the conflict between what the state Constitution says, that apparently applies only to recall elections, and what was in the new legislation passed this year?"

Gessler: "Well, the judge held that it was a conflict. We had tried to harmonize it, but it is what it is. So our approach is, you know, we've got to make this work.

Rosen should have Gessler back on his show to explain that the 2013 election-monderization law did not lead to the latest court ruling in the recall elections, and media outlets who published misleading articles should clarify.

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Misinformation Reigns As Gun Safety Laws Take Effect

(Bumped up for the holiday weekend by popular demand – Pols)

7NEWS reports:

Ammunition magazine limits and universal background check requirements are set to take effect in Colorado on Monday, even as county sheriffs fight to overturn the new laws in court.

But after months of tense debate among state officials, the signature pieces of Colorado Democrats' gun control legislation are moving from abstract to tangible.

Some gun stores already are stocking smaller magazines to comply with the 15-round limit. [Pols emphasis] And in the coming months, the public will see how the expansion of background checks to private and online sales will work.

Ever since the passage of landmark gun safety legislation this year in the Colorado General Assembly, we have tried in this space to sort out fact from fiction as gun right supporters made wild claims about what these bills would actually do–and local media generally repeated those claims without question. Today, as these laws finally take effect, the public continues to be grossly misinformed by local press on their true effects. Much of this appears to be the result of one man, Dave Kopel of the right-wing Independence Institute, who simultaneously acts as the media's "expert" on gun policy while he leads the lawsuit against these new laws.

This weekend, a story in the Denver Post by Ryan Parker, who we have already called out for uncritically reprinting gun lobby falsehoods, took the misinformation to a new level: 

At the Firing Line gun shop in Aurora, assorted guns are marked with red tags reading: "Not for sale after June 30." [Pols emphasis]

"We can sell the gun, but we won't be able to sell the magazine with it, so what's the point?" store manager Richard Taylor said…

A preliminary injunction hearing for parts of the law banning high-capacity ammunition magazines that hold more than 15 rounds — including the "readily converted" language, which could apply to removable base plates — is set for July 10.

"Parts of the (magazine ban) law are so vaguely written, sheriffs are unsure which magazines are legal and which are illegal," Kopel said.

For starters, this latest story from Ryan Parker totally ignores the technical guidance memo from Attorney General John Suthers on the magazine limit law, which very clearly interprets the bill's language, and puts to rest the nonsense about "removable baseplates" and which magazines would be "designed to be readily converted" into a high capacity magazine. And as we've said over and over, in every state where magazine capacity has been limited–Colorado is not the first state to enact this–compliant magazines are available. The claim from Kopel's boss Jon Caldara that "guns in Colorado will never be able to get a magazine again," which Kopel has never been asked to justify, is simply not supported by the facts. Yet here we have the state's newspaper of record subsidizing it!

We reported in early June that Gov. John Hickenlooper has requested a temporary injunction binding enforcement of the magazine limit to the terms of the AG's memo, which is all that proponents want. Again, nobody wants the draconian, speculative interpretations of this law suggested by opponents to be the standard. But Parker omits this as well, and only reports that Kopel is seeking an injunction to halt enforcement of the law entirely.

Saturday's Denver Post ran Parker's story on the front page, with a photo of a row of AR-15 type rifles labeled "not for sale after June 30th." But the truth is that compliant magazines are available for every one of those guns, and AR-15s are still legal for sale today. In short, the Post's front page Saturday amounted to a wholesale deception of its readers. The omissions and factual errors are so pervasive that they truly appear to be intentional. The only purpose we can identify for this story is no incite anger among gun owners and supporters of gun rights, while omitting all of the details that would mitigate that anger. To say this is not journalism is an understatement.

We can't tell you why the Denver Post's newsroom has chosen to so egregiously misreport the gun safety debate this year, but it is increasingly undeniable that they have an agenda other than objective journalism. The Post's editorial board has been a moderate voice in the debate over gun safety legislation this year, and has fact-checked some false claims from the gun lobby that the newsroom has missed. Meanwhile, as we've discussed, the Post's newsroom, led by avowed conservative political news editor Chuck Plunkett, has drilled on factual errors and gaffes by Democrats in multi-day feature stories–yet allowed opponents to claim basically any crazy thing they want without any kind of equivalent fact-checking. Each of these incidents generated its own isolated criticism.

With this latest round of front-page misinformation, it's time to suggest that it isn't "isolated."

Full story: Misinformation Reigns As Gun Safety Laws Take Effect

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