According to the spokesperson Dana Williams, the Secretary of State’s office received:
four election contests from Mr. Harkins and Ms. Severance on Monday, December 11, 2006 against Representative Dorothy Butcher, Senator Abel Tapia, Representative-Elect Sara Gagliardi, and Senator Moe Keller.
Mary Severance, the other challenger, herself has a checkered past. A decade ago she was prosecuted by a grand jury led by then Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter and Dave Thomas, the Jefferson County District Attorney.According to the Pueblo Chieftan, Mary Severance, of Pueblo, who is currently about 70 years old, was indicted in September of 1996 by a Colorado grand jury in connection with a bogus-check scheme that also involved LeRoy Schweitzer, a leader of the Freemen from “Justus Township” near Jordan, Montana involving two checks for more than $380,000 combined. The indictment also claimed that she “filed liens of $3.5 million each against 128 people on July 22. Her targets included Richard Johnson, Sandstrom, judges, court employees, a reporter and an editor for The Pueblo Chieftain.”
Not long after this happened, Colorado adopted a law making it easier to remove fraudulently filed liens in a reaction to this incident and similar ones elsewhere.
Harkins challenged Keller and Gagliardi, the other legislators were challenged by Mary Severance.
We examined one of those challenges, which rested on some odd legal theories, earlier this week.
In each case the substance of the response from the Secretary of State has stated:
According to
