Recommendations for changing city elections
Re: “Elected clerk for Denver urged,” Dec. 14 news story.
The mayor’s investigative panel offered some very good practical recommendations to the city for how to improve our broken election system. However, one of their recommendations will likely make matters worse: an elected county clerk being in charge of elections.
Denver is different from other counties in the sense that the same people run our state elections as well as our municipal elections. This means we have, at minimum, two elections every year, even in the odd years. Therefore, your election officials are never more than eight months from the next election.
A county clerk and recorder has numerous duties that have nothing to do with elections: filing deeds, marriages, and being a public trustee. Add to that the duties this person will carry as the city clerk, which are themselves burdensome, and we cannot have real expectations that an elected county clerk will be able to devote any more than 15 to 20 percent of their time to running the elections office.
Denver has a full-time election cycle and deserves a full-time elected official. One plan being discussed by the City Council calls for just that – a full-time, elected official whose sole responsibility is the Election Commission. If any change at all is to be made to the structure of the commission, this is the only proposal currently under consideration that has any chance of helping. The county clerk proposals are nearly guaranteed to only hurt.
Dan Willis, Denver
…
As long as people are willing to trust computers to count their votes, you will have many more stories to write about voting problems in the future. Americans obviously do not take voting very seriously, or we would have a national holiday on which to vote, we would insist on paper ballots counted by hand, and enough people would be willing to count the votes and to verify that they were counted accurately.
John Cleveland, Centennial
“Left Behind”: Violent religious video game
Re: “‘Left Behind’ game ignites a clash,” Dec. 13 news story.
In the past, Christian computer games have been a little lame. Let’s face it, kneeling in supplication to some deity or other or praying for grace points just doesn’t have the cachet that blasting the infidels has.
Troy Lyndon, chief executive of Left Behind Games Inc., has certainly put the lie to the Christian teaching that Islam is the only bloodthirsty religion left in the world. I suppose there may be some comfort in the cosmetic sanitation allowed by not showing the blood, the decapitations and the inevitable dying babies, but the image of having the “faithful” choose whether you live or die is a little ironic.
One has to wonder how the buying public would react to a Muslim game that gave points for skewering the non-believers by flying aircraft into their office buildings, or how this game will go over in Tel Aviv or Baghdad.
Sam Domenico, Golden
Race issue and Obama
Re: “Obama may reveal nation’s true colors in presidential race,” Dec. 13 news story.
Regarding Barack Obama’s chances for the president, the article says he “has cross-racial appeal. He’s a politician who happens to be black, not a black politician.”
What does that mean? If you “happen to be black” in America, does that somehow make you insensitive to the thousands of black people who drowned in New Orleans? Is a “happen to be black” politician oblivious to the fact that most of his 99 peer senators happen to be white? I wonder if Obama happens to realize that his father was from Kenya, a country that happened to have been colonized by white people and that continues to suffer at the hands of the West.
I believe that Obama happens to be a very smart man, who realizes that America is still a dangerous place for a “black politician” to speak his mind without recourse.
By the way, I am a white man who does not happen not to be racist. It is clear to me that the men in charge of this country who all “happen to be white” need a time out!
P.J. D’Amico, Denver
To send a letter
E-mail: openforum@denverpost.com (only straight text, not attachments)
Mail: The Open Forum, The Denver Post, 101 W. Colfax Ave., Suite 600, Denver, 80202
Fax: 303-954-1502
Guidelines: The Post welcomes letters up to 200 words on topics of general interest. Letters must include full name, home address and day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be edited for length, grammar and accuracy.
To reach us by phone: 303-954-1331
