Scott Gessler’s Blame Games Debunked Yet Again

Scott Gessler.

An excellent story in today's Durango Herald from reporter Joe Hanel demolishes recent claims from Secretary of State Scott Gessler that last year's election modernization bill, House Bill 1303, has pushed his office's budget into the red.

The truth? Gessler just doesn't manage money very well.

Gessler’s office was running a $7 million surplus – so large it violated the law – in June 2012. A year later, it had fallen to less than $2 million, and now legislators are worried his budget will need extra money to keep it afloat.

Most of the shortfall traces back to Gessler’s cuts to business filing fees, according to budget numbers the Herald obtained through the Colorado Open Records Act. He also spent money on website upgrades to make it easier to register a business in Colorado.

Gessler, a Republican, is running for governor, and he touts his cuts to business fees on the campaign trail. But under the Capitol dome, he places blame for his collapsing budget on House Bill 1303, a mail-voting bill that Democrats passed last spring. [Pols emphasis]

“The issue basically with the budget is 1303’s been a budget-buster. It’s blown our budget out of the water,” Gessler said at a Dec. 19 oversight hearing at the Legislature…

As Hanel explains and an astute reader of our blog laid out earlier this month, Secretary of State Gessler has repeatedly cut the fees paid by businesses other entities to register with the state, including "holidays" where the fees were basically eliminated for months at a time. This was done in part to reduce the Secretary of State's then very large budget surplus to the level allowed by law. Costs of modernizing the election system after House Bill 1303 were incurred, Hanel reports, but only after Gessler's office had lost millions of dollars in revenue from reduced fees on businesses.

As a Republican candidate for governor in 2014, Gessler has used these cuts–which he was partly obligated to make–as proof of his pro-business credentials. In hindsight, though, it looks like Gessler cut fees much too aggressively, leaving him with no cushion to pay for implementing an election modernization bill authored by county clerks from both parties. And what about all the money spent unsuccessfully defending Gessler from last year's ethics complaint?

It's not unreasonable to be, you know, less sympathetic to Gessler's budget problems with all this in mind.

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Scott Gessler’s Got Quite The Mouth On Him

Yes he’s a honey badger, but he’s YOUR honey badger.

The Fort Collins Coloradoan's veteran political reporter Patrick Malone has a great story up about GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott Gessler's first full day on the campaign trail. One of the reasons that Gessler has so richly earned his nickname "Honey Badger" is the ruthless indifference with which he has pursued a partisan political agenda since taking office as Colorado's Secretary of State in 2011. "Honey Badger doesn't care" sums up the audacious manner in which Gessler has repeatedly tried to refashion election rules to his ideological liking, endorsed talk-radio conspiracy theories about elections while being totally unable to substantiate them, and unrepentantly stumbled into an ethics scandal.

And folks, "Honey Badger" is exactly what you can expect from Gessler on the campaign trail:

[Gessler] said the state is slouching toward lawlessness and economic ruin akin to Chicago and Detroit. He called Colorado’s voting laws with mandatory vote centers and universal mail ballots the worst in the country.

Gessler, a Republican, scapegoated incumbent Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper for those circumstances and more to a crowd of eight, ranging in age from about 60 and older, assembled at The Elks lodge in Fort Collins…

“I’ve found that I’m not able to accomplish the things I want as secretary of state,” [Pols emphasis] requiring photo identification for voting among them, Gessler said. “Right now it’s a dream. We can’t get it through the Democratic Legislature and the governor would never approve of it.”

Gessler touted his experience as an executive office holder and his willingness to stand up to criticisms — and there have been many — of his handling of the secretary of state job. He said that separates him from the rest of the Republican field.

“You’ve seen what I’ve done as secretary of state,” Gessler said. “I’ve taken a sleepy administrative backwater, and I’ve changed it in a way that it’s never been changed before in the history of the state of Colorado.” [Pols emphasis]

It's important to recognize the particular dog whistle Gessler is blowing here. This is a message aimed at the more politically Machiavellian conservative Republican types who are, among other things, reliable primary voters. When Gessler says proudly that he has "changed" the "sleepy administrative backwater" of the secretary of state's office, he's taking credit for three years of more or less continuous attempts, most turned back in court, at manipulating the elections process in Colorado for partisan gain. He's taking credit for years of partisan allegations of "illegal voters" that have consistently evaporated once examined by anyone outside his office. He's taking credit for slashing the fines against Republican organizations out of legal compliance, then hosting a fundraiser to help them repay the remainder. Pretty much everything that has outraged Democrats since Gessler took office–these are his selling points with a significant segment of the GOP primary electorate.

The ones who agree with Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, who was quite candid about the fact that "our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

Make sure to read Malone's whole story, where Gessler goes on to accuse Gov. John Hickenlooper of just about everything short of personally beating up kids for their lunch money. "Slouching toward economic ruin akin to Chicago and Detroit," whatever that means. There will be lots of time on the trail to talk about Hickenlooper's negatives, real and imagined. What's fascinating about Gessler's campaign to us right now is his audacious attempt to turn his own potent negatives into positives, at least for the purposes of winning the nomination.

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Get Ready For Scott Gessler’s Big Announcement!

That's the word in an awesome shareable graphic now making the rounds:

We assume it's Scott Gessler's long awaited announcement that he's running for Governor, but it could be the hat.

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Lt. Governor Garcia Names Scott Wasserman COS

Wasserman

Lieutenant Governor Joe Garcia has a new Chief of Staff. In an email to state government staff sent out yesterday, Garcia announced that Scott Wasserman will be taking over the job from Andrew Freedman, who left last month to head up the "Colorado Commits to Kids" tax initiative. From the email:

I am pleased to announce that Scott Wasserman will be joining our office as the new Chief of Staff beginning September 1.

Scott has a strong reputation as a collaborative leader who has the ability to cultivate and develop relationships with a wide array of stakeholders. He has served in a variety of legislative and government relations positions over the past 12 years and brings a tremendous level of experience from his most recent job as executive and political director of Colorado Workers for Innovation and New Solutions (WINS).

This is a good hire for Garcia. Wasserman is a veteran politico who understands state government and the legislature.

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