Keep in mind that opponents of voter ID laws or any other form of electoral integrity measures have repeatedly assured us that voter fraud never happens.

We recently looked at the results of a survey which shows that roughly half of the country believes that voter fraud is real and takes place on at least a somewhat regular basis. But even the authors of that poll were dumbfounded and prefaced their findings with all sorts of reminders about how there’s simply no evidence to support that idea. Tell that to the people of Colorado, who were the latest to learn that many of their dearly departed were still somehow participating in democracy with alarming regularity. (CBS 4, Denver)

A CBS4 investigation has found multiple cases of dead men and women voting in Colorado months and in some cases years after their deaths, a revelation that calls into question safeguards designed to prevent such occurrences. “We do believe there were several instances of potential vote fraud that occurred,” said Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams after reviewing the CBS4 findings. “It shows there is the potential for fraud.” The cases of dead men and women casting ballots ranged from El Paso County in southern Colorado to Denver and Jefferson County. CBS4 discovered the fraudulent voting by comparing databases of voting histories in Colorado against a federal death database.

Colorado’s Secretary of State (a Republican, by the way) still seemed to want to play this down, only admitting that there was the potential for voter fraud and that the system has some gaps. I suppose that’s natural, given that nobody wants something this embarrassing showing up on their watch, but it’s also another case of sheer denial of reality. The local news investigation highlights the case of Sara Sosa of Colorado Springs. The poor dear passed away in 2009, but continued to cast her ballot in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013. Now, Sara was married, so the first suspect might be her husband. Was he “keeping it in the family” and voting for her after she went to her eternal reward? Nope. Turns out that Mr. Sosa died in 2008 himself. And yet that didn’t stop him from voting the following year either.

And this wasn’t statewide. We’re only talking about an investigation into a couple of counties and they came up with dozens of dead voters. It’s on a smaller scale than our previous story of this type where the dead in one section of California were found to be voting in the hundreds, but it’s still troubling in the extreme. This is particularly true when you consider the 2002 election in Colorado’s 7th district where their representative to Congress was decided by 121 votes, as the reporter in this article notes.

So if we allow the media to ignore the California findings, this becomes yet another “isolated instance” of a few bad apples, right? Obviously not. I hate to keep beating a dead horse here (pun intended) but this goes back to what I’ve been trying to get across for years. Liberals get away with saying that voter fraud isn’t a problem based on the small number of confirmed, prosecuted instances on record. But the low numbers are a result of the fact that nobody is looking for it. When they do, they find it, and Colorado has simply proven that rule of thumb once again.