In Pueblo as elsewhere in the state, inactive voters are now meant to visit the clerk’s office or a polling place to retrieve ballots. With the election a month away, Gessler’s directive seems likely to effectively disenfranchise the soldiers.

On Wednesday, Ortiz told the Colorado Independent he was pained by the idea of not sending out the ballots. “This is not a comfortable place to be,” he said, adding that not sending the ballots went against all of his priorities as clerk. He said he felt the clock ticking for the inactive-voter soldiers.

Last night, Ortiz told the Pueblo Chieftan that he remained undecided on whether or not to follow Gessler’s order. He said he planned to consult with County Attorney Dan Kogovsek on the matter.

Contacted this morning, Ortiz’s office said he would comment on the Gessler order after a roughly hour-long scheduled conference call, presumably with Kogovsek, on the course of action they plan to chart for Pueblo County.

Colorado election law clash

Gessler last week filed a lawsuit against Denver County over its plan to mail ballots to all registered voters, active and inactive. Denver has mailed ballots to all registered voters for the last five years and has already sent its ballots out this year. A district court is scheduled on October 7th to hear arguments in the case.

In announcing his new interpretation of state election law, Gessler explained that he is seeking to make the rules uniform across counties on whether or not clerks can mail ballots to inactive voters and he said he was concerned to guard against possible registration fraud.

In making his case, Gessler has cited a Colorado statute that directs county clerks to “mail [ballots] to each active registered elector.” That language comes from legislation passed in 2008 that explicitly required Colorado counties to mail ballots to inactive as well as to active voters but that only passed as a temporary measure amid complaints that it established an unfunded mandate. In its absence, Gessler argues, counties cannot send ballots to inactive voters.

Many observers, including two members of Congress who champion voter-rights, see Gessler’s interpretation as a stretch. They see the reading as part of a larger Republican drive in states across the nation built on overblown threats of voter fraud but designed to suppress voter participation in advance of next year’s presidential election.

Election officials and experts say the chances of voter ballots getting into the wrong hands is escalated when they are mailed out, and Gessler spokesman Andrew Cole echoed those concerns Thursday to the Chieftan.

“There were thousands of ballots mailed out to inactive voters in 2010 that were unaccounted for,” he said.

The Secretary of State, however, has yet to offer evidence that any inactive voter ballot has ever been used to commit fraud of any kind.

‘A fashionable political theme’

Detractors have come to look with skepticism on concerns about fraud voiced by Gessler.

Before he was elected Secretary of State last year, Gessler built a law career as a Republican champion of partisan interpretations of campaign finance and election law. In the spring, he championed stiff voter ID legislation by citing examples of voter fraud committed in the state that he said his office had detected.

Before legislative committees in Denver and in Washington, he suggested there could have been as many as 5,000 votes cast in the state by non-citizens in 2010. He later said he was “certain” that 106 people on Colorado’s voter roll of 3.7 million were ‘improperly registered.’

Estelle Rogers, director of advocacy for Project Vote, told the Colorado Independent at the time that the Gessler numbers were shockingly unreliable and that his proposed response to those unreliable numbers went beyond overreaching.

“His 106 people is about 0.0028648648649 percent of total registered voters,” she said. “Obviously such an error rate is to be expected whenever human beings are copying data from one list to another. Before the secretary of state jumps to the conclusion that these are 106 cases of voter fraud, he should have a lot more evidence than mere suspicion. Non-citizen voting is a fashionable political theme these days, but it has no basis in reality. And the right to vote is too important to confuse with sloganeering.”

That’s what Ortiz thinks too. He told the Independent he was pained at the idea of not sending ballots to soldiers in harm’s way. He also said he believed, based on advice from counsel, that not sending ballots to the inactive-voter soldiers violated the federal Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act, which obligates county clerks to send ballots to all “covered voters,” which the act clearly defines as all eligible voters in the military, making no distinction between active and inactive voter status.

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No doubt there is a genuine tenderness in the president’s feelings for soldiers. But there is little of the praise of warriors in his words. Gratitude or sympathy for suffering is quite different from honoring a sacrifice. I am sure Obama will honor his pledge to continue to ensure that people in uniform “form the backbone of our middle class.” But the pay, the benefits, the programs alone are never enough and never, ultimately, what make the call to service worth answering.

“Little of the praise of warriors?” I suppose all that stuff about “Thanks in great measure to your service, the situation in Iraq has improved” or how “in an age when so many people and institutions have acted irresponsibly, you did the opposite – you volunteered to bear the heaviest burden” doesn’t count.

Donnelly says that Obama’s promises on troops’ and veterans’ health care and economic well-being is “a very subtle form of the soldier-as-victim trope that is fast becoming an Iraq legacy.” That seems like an overwrought description of the national mood. There have been a handful of Hollywood flops that might have condescendingly treated soldiers as PTSD’d automatons, but beyond that, the treatment of Iraq veterans by the country has been, I think it’s fair to say, respectful verging on laudatory. Donnelly seems to be caught in something of a Vietnam Syndrome here.

More importantly, and to be a bit personal for a moment, I’ve heard some real horror stories from friends who’ve come home from Iraq and Afghanistan about how hard it is to get appointments with consistent and competent Veterans’ Affairs case workers, and VA health care is supposed to be the best in the nation. Is it treating my friends as “victims” to say that the country owes them a lot more than a pep talk about what a great job they did? Or to say that traumatic brain injury or post-traumatic stress disorder are serious afflictions that require sustained and well-funded programs to treat? Just because people join the military to serve a cause greater than self isn’t an excuse not to provide veterans with the money they need to prosper when their wars end.

Can we go home now? I’m out of movies to watch and I’m not going to pay $10 for a DVD like some millionaire would. I’m not sure how I will watch movies back home; $20 for a new DVD seems like highway robbery considering they are $1 from the bootleggers in Iraq.

Six men were arrested on May 7, 2007, in New Jersey, as two of them were meeting a confidential government witness “to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006,” according to a criminal complaint.

The sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to a reduced charge of providing firearms to illegal aliens and received a sentence of 20 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

TWI’s Daphne Eviatar cited the trial in a piece last week about the U.S. government’s use of plants and paid informants in such terrorism cases. You can read it here.

Behind the avenue, to the east, four vehicles — two white trucks and two Humvees — waited to drive down the strip, rendered pitch black by the giant flood lights behind them. When the call sounded, they drove slowly off, greeted by the salute of the soldiers flanking them.

The only soldiers not saluting were seated along the edge of the Humvees, three to a side, 12 in total, and they flanked the trucks’ cargo: the flag-draped coffins of two fallen comrades, two more to have died in the bloodiest year for the U.S. in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion.