Getting Out The Vote

Colorado used to be a fairly reliable red state with the hippies mostly confined to Boulder County and a central Denver. Voter registration reflected this with the numbers moving pretty much in lockstep with one another as this chart from the Colorado Observer shows:

Until Sept 08 when ACORN began wholesale registration of large numbers of previously unheard from entities, some of whom later proved to be figments of an acid-tainted imagination. Now those 10,000 new voters may well be mostly real, but jumps like that look suspicious to me. The SOS is starting a campaign to discover a total of 900,000 new potential voters, but I think his efforts might be as well directed to cleaning up the existing rolls.

Of course the other side of this is that a lot of people prefer to let their neighbors do the voting for them. Be interesting to see what the actual participation rates look like this time.