The Arapahoe County district attorney’s office has charged four people with misdemeanors after a voter-fraud investigation that tracked more than 40 people and election records dating back to 2008.
Two of the people charged are immigrants — one from Africa who has donated to Democratic causes, the other from Poland — who have been deemed ineligible to vote in Colorado. The other two are Coloradans who worked for a liberal non-profit organization that registered people to vote.
All four are charged with “procuring false registration,” according to a news release Friday from Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler’s office. The office investigated 41 “non-citizens.”
http://liarcatchers.com/fraud_investigation.html
“This is evidence that this is not an epidemic, but there are isolated incidents that need to be treated seriously,” Brauchler said.
The investigation began in July after Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler referred 155 cases of “non-citizen voters” to 15 district attorneys statewide. Brauchler assigned six investigators who worked more than 300 hours to go through the 41 names in his district.
That information led investigators to Work for Progress, a national nonprofit that formed in 2008 and hires canvassers to register voters. Investigators served the group with a warrant at its office in LoDo in a building shared by other liberal groups, including Environment Colorado and ProgressNowColorado, which has since moved.
Work for Progress could not be reached for comment. ProgressNow’s executive director, Amy Runyon-Harms, says her organization has never been affiliated or worked with Work for Progress.
The district attorney charged canvassers Michael Michaelis, 41, of Brighton, and Carl Blocker, 51.
Michaelis was employed by Work for Progress, while Blocker was employed by one of its subcontractors, Grass Roots Voter Outreach, according to the release.
Blocker has been in jail in Fairplay since August on a parole violation hold, according to a Park County jail official. Colorado Bureau of Investigation records show he has been arrested on various charges, including burglary and drug possession.
The two non-citizens who were charged are Tadesse Degefa, 72, and Vitaliy Grabchenko, 47, both of Aurora.
Degefa donated $100 to Hickenlooper’s 2010 campaign and $100 to the Arapahoe County Democratic Party, secretary of state records show. He also has donated to President Obama and a committee that works to elect Democrats to Congress, according to online campaign contribution websites.
None of the four charged could be reached for comment.
Arapahoe County so far is the only jurisdiction that has charged anyone, according to Gessler spokesman Andrew Cole, although some district attorneys did find instances of non-citizens voting.
“I appreciate District Attorney Brauchler’s good work,” Gessler said Friday.
“This news further confirms that there is a vulnerability in the system and is more evidence from across the state showing that confusion and error allow non-citizens to register, and in some cases vote. We know 600 ineligible registrations have been canceled for non-citizenship since we began looking into this. These cases are just one more part our efforts to improve election integrity in Colorado.”
Gessler made national headlines in 2011 when he testified before Congress that 11,805 people had shown “non-citizen” documents when they applied for a Colorado driver’s license, and almost 5,000 of them had voted in 2010, when control of the state House and the winner of a U.S. Senate seat were decided by close votes.
He has been criticized by county clerks in his own party and Democrats for his statements and efforts regarding non-citizen voters. Among them, Democratic political consultant Steve Welchert, who called the investigation “massive overkill.”
“These guys are in search of a problem,” he said.
Brauchler, a Republican who took office in January, disagreed.
“We’re not talking about a traffic offense here,” he said. “We’re talking about somebody’s right to participate in the democratic process.”
The 18th Judicial District covers Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties. No names were submitted from Elbert and Lincoln, four were from Douglas and the rest from Arapahoe, the DA’ s office said in the release.
In Douglas County, all four voters turned out to be eligible.
“Once this determination was made, investigators thanked them for their time and assured them that their constitutional right to vote would not be affected in any way in the future,” the release states.
Of the other 37 in Arapahoe County, 17 were deemed eligible, eight could not be located and two were ineligible. Ten voters were “potentially” ineligible, but were not charged.
“There was no proof beyond a reasonable doubt that they had illegally registered, and in some cases had been misled as to their right to vote or did not understand the process and therefore did not possess criminal intent to commit a crime,” the release says.
