When Mike Coffman, Colorado’s secretary of state, announced last month he was going to keep his position while also running for Congress, he put himself in a difficult position.
Running for Congress is an inherently political act that includes fundraising and strategizing. Yet Coloradans expect, and rightly so, that the secretary will stay above politics and conduct impartial elections.
Doing both is not an impossible task, but it puts a heavy burden on Coffman to be hyper-sensitive about conflicts of interest, or even the appearance of a conflict.
News stories this week revealed that Coffman had engaged a political firm for his congressional campaign that also had, as a client, a voting machine company that was seeking certification from Coffman. As it turns out, the company, Premier Elections Solutions, was the only one to get certified.
We’re not suggesting, at this point, that Coffman’s actions showed favoritism. However, the situation illustrates why he needs to be more careful about even the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Elected in 2006, Coffman had served as secretary less than a year when the congressional seat became a possibility after Congressman Tom Tancredo announced he would not run in 2008.
Ethical restrictions mean Coffman will have a more difficult time raising money for his congressional campaign while acting as secretary of state. But we think his job imposes even greater obligations.
The public counts on the secretary to make and enforce impartial election rules that won’t favor one party or candidate over another. We rely on the office to make sure elections are conducted without influence.
That’s why it was troubling to learn that the political consulting firm that Coffman is working with, Phase Line Strategies, also had Premier as a client.
Coffman said he learned of the connection a couple of months ago. At that point, he should have changed political consultants. No harm, no foul. At the very least, he should have disclosed the situation.
It doesn’t help that Premier was the only one of four voting machine companies to be certified for use in the 2008 elections in Colorado. The others didn’t make the grade.
In explaining the relationship, Coffman said he never met with Phase Line or Premier during the certification process. He said he worked hard to keep the certification process safe from outside influence.
It isn’t the first time that questions have been raised about potential political activity within Coffman’s office. An employee, Dan Kopelman, was found to have broken office rules by running a partisan political business while he worked in Coffman’s office. As part of his business, Kopelman sold campaign data to Republicans. A state audit found no evidence that Kopelman accessed voter data at work for the business.
Some ethics watchdogs call it a symptom of mismanagement within the office. We wouldn’t go that far, but it certainly did bespeak a need for the rules about those sorts of conflicts to be more broadly known within the office.
During the next year, we would hope to see Coffman redouble his efforts to keep his politics separate from his state job. It’s not going to be an easy road, but it’s one he chose and voters have every right to expect that he travel it in a way that’s beyond reproach.
