DENVER, CO – Reacting to plaintiffs’ abandoning their attack on Colorado’s requirement that a voter’s signature be used to authenticate their submitted mail ballot, President Derek Lyons of RITE released the following statement today:
“The left’s sudden retreat in Vet Voice Foundation v. Griswold demonstrates that fraud protections, including Colorado’s requirement for signature verification for mail-in ballots, pose no threat to the right to vote. Liberal activists are involved in a duplicitous litigation strategy to undermine American elections. From one side of their mouth, they proclaim that mail voting is perfectly safe and secure. From the other side, their high-paid lawyers try to convince courts to tear down the minimal integrity measures in place to promote election integrity and public trust and confidence. Today marks a notable defeat for that strategy. Once Colorado courts rightfully determined that mail balloting and integrity measures must go hand-in-hand, the activists realized that their crusade against ballot authentication measures had little chance of success. Judges in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere should take note and act decisively against similar efforts to misuse the courts to undermine elections .
“RITE played an integral role in winning this case by ensuring that the left cannot pick and choose the parts of mail voting that they like. Agreeing with RITE, the Colorado courts concluded that if the attack on signature matching were to succeed, the consequence would be a return to polling place voting, not mail voting without signature matching. Faced with that daunting possibility, the activists abandoned their lawsuit.
“Conducting identity verification before counting ballots has bipartisan support, but liberals are spending millions on legal challenges to stop states from doing it. Colorado conducts its elections almost entirely by mail. The signature match requirement is the state’s only means of verifying that that ballots it receives were in fact cast by the voters to whom they were sent. Eliminating it would have exposed Colorado and its people to the threat of elections decided by ballots not authenticated by any process at all.
“Previously, cases like this sometimes lacked a vigorous defense, allowing liberal activists to win and gain an electoral advantage. Those days are over. RITE is committed to defending the law in every state to help restore integrity and trust in elections.”
– Derek Lyons, President of RITE
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