Colorado’s Secretary of State has revised the voter registration form. Colorado had been one of the few states that has registration by party, but which didn’t list the qualified parties. Instead, the person filing out the form had to write-in the party of his or her choice.
The new form, instead, lists the five qualified parties (Republican, Democratic, American Constitution, Green and Libertarian) and gives a checkbox for each. It also has a blank line for voters who want to register into an unqualified party.
That makes Colorado only thirty-five years behind the times.
Is “unqualified” a legal category in Colorado, or does it simply refer to any party name outside those five? For example, could someone simply write in, say, “Prohibition” or “Socialist” in order to register with one of those parties? What if someone were to write in a fictitious or bogus party name? Or my all time favorite (from FEC records), “Puritan Ethic, Prohibition, and Magnetohydrodynamics Party?”