United States presidential election in Colorado, 2008

This year in the 2008 Presidential election, Colorado is a swing state, according to Real Clear Politics's poll average, Barack Obama has maintained a small lead of as much as 5.3% over John McCain since the nomination, save a nine day period between August 15th and August 24th when McCain led Obama by a marginal .5%.In 2004 Colorado voted for the incumbent President George W. Bush by a margin of less than 5 percentage points with 51.7% of the vote, about half the 9% margin he won over Al Gore in 2000. Additionally, Colorado voters decided not to pass a referendum that would have split their electoral vote for this and future presidential elections.

Colorado is especially key in the 2008 Presidential election as if for example Barack Obama was able to gain Colorado's nine electoral votes and also able to win all the states that Al Gore won in 2000, he would take the presidency, beating John McCain by a margin of 273 to 265 electoral votes. Not incidentally, as of this posting, according to Real Clear Politics electoral projections, if the election were held today, that indeed would be the margin.

Particular attention is being paid on Colorado given its important swing state status, journalist Greg Palast in conjunction with www.stealbackyourvote.org has claimed that "Colorado Secretary of State Donetta Davidson has made the state the epicenter of the rampant practice of purging voter registration lists for alleged irregularities." He also has said that Donetta Davidson, who had been secretary of state in the state of Colorado, had removed 19.4 percent — one out of five voters in the state of Colorado. Interestingly, Davidson has been tapped by George Bush to head the new Election Assistance Commission, in capacity where she can train all 50 secretaries of state.

Additionally on September, 18th, 2008 CNN reported on a recently published study done by the Government Accountability Office whose reporting on voting system testing found that the Election Assistance Commission has not notified election officials across the country about electronic voting machine failures. In the same article, CNN also reported on a study conducted by Common Cause that in Colorado, 20,000 left polling places without voting in 2006 because of crashed computer registration machines and long lines. And for this upcoming election day, Colorado will have another new registration system.

Jenny Flanagan of Common Cause was quoted as saying, "You know, Colorado is two years behind many states in implementing a statewide voter database. ... This is a new system, and there's just a lot of unknowns as to whether or not voters will be successful."

There has been some actions made in order to prevent problems on election day in Colorado, for example, Denver, Colorado, is going back to a paper poll book registration for this election, which is seen to be the simplest way to conduct U.S. presidential elections.

Statewide winner in bold. "See main article : U.S. presidential election, 2004."

References

External links

* [http://www.coloradoindependent.com/5802/palast-uses-dnc-to-tout-‘steal-back-your-vote’-project-with-kennedy/]