It was an honest mistake, of course. Could’ve happened to anyone.

As it happens, though, it happened to Colorado’s Democrat secretary of state. Just prior to a crucial midterm election. That secretary of state, Jena Griswold, says her office “mistakenly” sent postcards to about 30,000 noncitizens (read: fellow Democrats) encouraging them to register to vote in next month’s midterm elections.

Helpfully printed in both English and Spanish, the postcards read: “A message from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold … Our records indicate that you or your household may be eligible to vote, but do not appear to be registered at your current address.”

Just spit-balling here, but if we wanted to institute a statewide system of bulk-mail ballot fraud, a scheme like this would come in pretty handy — especially if we were trying to attract the votes of recently arrived Spanish speakers.

And just to be clear, 30,000 votes is a lot of votes in a purplish state like Colorado. Heck, that many votes during a presidential election could easily flip a swing state like, say, Arizona or Georgia or Wisconsin; it could easily swing some congressional seats; and it could easily salt away a crucial Senate seat like the one being defended by Democrat incumbent Michael Bennet, who’s leading hard-charging Republican challenger Joe O'Dea by just six points.

Griswold, ever the good Democrat foot soldier, manned up and blamed the error on, uh, “a database glitch related to the state’s list of residents with driver’s licenses,” while reassuring us that none of those Democrats noncitizens will be allowed to register if they dare try.

Get a load of how the Associated Press tells us that there’s nothingtoseeheremovealong: “The news comes at a time of widespread skepticism — often unfounded — of voting integrity following the 2020 presidential election and as Griswold, who has touted her role as a national advocate for secure elections, seeks reelection in the November midterms.”

Yep, concerns about voter integrity are “often unfounded.” And there’s nothing to be skeptical about when Basement Joe “81 Million Votes” Biden wins a presidential election despite losing 18 of 19 bellwether counties and despite winning a smaller percentage of counties, 16.7%, than any winning president ever. No, nothing to be skeptical about when decrepit ol’ Joe can’t draw flies to a campaign rally and yet somehow inspires more population-adjusted citizens to vote for him than even rock-star Barack Obama did in 2008.

Colorado Public Radio first reported the incident, but there’s no word about who exactly alerted CPR to the matter. According to its reporting:

“The Department has become aware that approximately 30,000 EBU [Eligible But Unregistered] postcard mailers were incorrectly sent to ineligible Coloradans,” said a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office. “The office is undertaking an internal review of the incident and will take any corrective action that is warranted.”

The office said the problem occurred when the state compared a list of potential unregistered voters from a multi-state group Colorado belongs to, with local DMV records. The DMV data included people who hold non-citizen driver’s licenses — which were created to allow people without legal residency to drive legally — but a formatting error caused the system not to flag them as ineligible.

Noncitizen driver’s licenses, eh? What could go wrong?

“Two years ago,” CPR’s reporting continues, “the same type of mailing also brought controversy, after it was alleged some postcards went to people who had died or were not citizens.”

But, again, it was an honest mistake.

The culprit here is ERIC, a.k.a. the Electronic Registration Information Center, which we warned about back in August. Created back in 2012, it’s the brainchild of hard-left activist David Becker and the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts. ERIC was sold to states as a quick and easy way to update their voter rolls and is supposed to be run by the member states themselves. But public records show that Democrat operatives are working overtime under the cover of this deeply embedded effort to drive Democrat voter turnout.

Currently used in 31 states — including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin — ERIC is ostensibly responsible for tightening a state’s voter rolls. But it actually inflates those rolls.

Indeed, while ERIC was responsible for the purging of just three million ineligible voters from the nation’s rolls in 2020, the system identified 17 million new voters. And you can be sure that that trove of new voters didn’t come from rural areas or the evenly divided suburbs; it came from urban areas like Atlanta and Milwaukee and Phoenix.

Again, what could go wrong? And what on earth are Republican-controlled states doing with this system managing their voting rolls?