DENVER – A legal dispute between Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler and the clerk and recorder in Denver is drawing national attention.

Gessler, a Republican, sued Denver clerk Debra Johnson, a Democrat, for her plans to send out mail ballots for this fall’s election to inactive voters – people who haven’t voted since 2008.

On Wednesday, a pair of Democratic congressmen asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Gessler, alleging that he is trying to keep people from voting.

“No right is mentioned more times in the Constitution than the right to vote,” said U.S. Rep. Charles Gonzalez of Texas, the top Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees elections. “It is the responsibility of every public official to ensure that eligible citizens are not denied that right. Secretary Gessler, instead, has taken steps that could prevent Coloradans’ civic participation.”

Although the 2011 statewide ballot has just one question – a tax increase for education – there’s little mystery about why a local dispute is drawing national scrutiny.

“This seems to me that it’s more political in relation to 2012 than it is anything else,” said Rick Palacio, chairman of the Colorado Democratic Party.

Prognosticators have pegged Colorado as one of the handful of swing states President Barack Obama will need to win. Because Democratic voters have fallen onto the inactive rolls much faster than Republicans, Democrats sense a plot to suppress their voters.

Gessler denies it.

Both La Plata and Montezuma counties are holding mail elections, and the clerks plan to follow Gessler’s advice and send ballots only to active voters.

But two heavily Democratic counties, Denver and Pueblo, want to send ballots in this all-mail election to every registered voter, active or inactive.

Gessler told all county clerks that his reading of state law allows ballots to be sent only to active voters.

Gessler’s spokesman, Andrew Cole, said politics have nothing to do with it.

“If Douglas County or El Paso County (two GOP strongholds) had come to us and said, ‘We want to mail to inactive voters,’ we would have had the same answer because we’re following the law,” Cole said.

Until this year, counties that conducted mail elections had to send ballots to both active and inactive voters. But the state Legislature ended the requirement that ballots go to inactive voters as of this summer.

Cole said that if some counties send ballots to everyone and others do not, it could cause an unfair election. Gessler also is worried about the possibility of voter fraud, Cole said.

In Gessler’s lawsuit, he asks the judge to confirm that each county clerk “is a subordinate officer who has a ministerial duty to obey the order of the secretary even when the clerk disagrees with the interpretation (of the law).”

That doesn’t really bother La Plata County Clerk Tiffany Lee Parker, who agrees with Gessler’s reading of the law about inactive voters.

“If the secretary of state provides us with a directive, and I’m comfortable with the directive, I will follow it. I’m very comfortable with this,” she said.

Voter registration numbers bear out the Democrats’ fear that they have more to lose in this fight.

A vigorous voter turnout effort by the Obama campaign brought Democrats to near parity with Republicans in late 2008.

But the ranks of active Democratic voters fell by 161,000 between December 2008 and August 2011, compared with a loss of just 70,000 for active Republican voters. The number of active unaffiliated voters fell by 112,000 between 2008 and last month.

The fracas points out a problem with mail elections, said Alan Franklin, operations director of ProgressNow Colorado, a left-leaning group.

Until now, active or inactive status didn’t matter much because everyone showed up at the polls to vote. But some people vote only in presidential elections.

“We had so many people on the bench last year. If that is the criteria for switching people to inactive status, it terrifies me,” Franklin said.

Franklin planned to deliver more than 3,000 petitions of protest to Gessler on Friday.

The last day to register to vote is Monday. People who are registered but inactive can visit www.govotecolorado.com to update their status through the third week in October.

jhanel@durangoherald.com