Yuma County resident, Mike O’Donnell, has thrown his hat into the ring to be Republican nominee for Colorado Secretary of State at the November 2022 election.
“That office is, or ought to be, a business office serving the entire business community as well as all the voting citizens of Colorado,” O’Donnell said. “It seems to have strayed from both paths.”
O’Donnell spent 20 years as the head of Colorado Lending Source, a nonprofit economic development organization and the largest U.S. Small Business Administration lender in the state. He currently operates a nonprofit that provides otherwise financially excluded small business owners in Colorado access to the 0-percent Kiva loan program (kiva.org). He lives in the Kirk area in southern Yuma County with his family.
“Unfortunately, as is all too common these days, some elected officials seem to forget why they were elected and get carried away by the power that comes from holding public office, O’Donnell said in his announcement.
O’Donnell said that the incumbent Secretary of State is battling multiple law suits while the state itself is facing a federal suit for violating the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 by having the “dirtiest” electoral rolls in the nation.
“Forty of Colorado’s sixty-four counties have voter registrations rates exceeding 100 percent of the eligible citizen voting age registrations, “ said O’Donnell. “Dirty voting rolls increase the potential for bad political actors to hijack mail-in ballots for their own ends.
“I would work to clean up the electoral rolls.”
In addition to potential electoral integrity issues that many Colorado citizens are concerned about, O’Donnell is also focused on the economics of operating the Office of the Secretary of State.
“Many people don’t realize that the registration fees the Office collects from the more than one million business filings that occur in Colorado each year, is enough to make the Office more than 90-percent self-sufficient” he said. “It is the only Colorado government office that doesn’t require huge amounts of taxpayer support each year.
“But not in 2022/23,” said O’Donnell.
“The incumbent Secretary of State has organized with the legislature to drop all business filing fees for the 2022/23 fiscal year to $1, necessitating a transfer of $16.71 million in taxpayer funds from the General Fund to operate the Office in 2022/23.”
O’Donnell said that Colorado has amongst the lowest business registration and filing fees in the nation so it makes no sense to drop fees to almost nothing six months from now.
“I imagine that the timing of the fee drop, which overlaps the incumbent Secretary of State’s reelection bid, is purely coincidental,” O’Donnell said, rolling his eyes.
“Irrespective, as a Colorado taxpayer I’m fed up with the state government wasting tax payer dollars. There is absolutely no defensively logical business reason to drop business filing fees in 2022/23. None whatsoever. If there are leftover taxpayer funds in the General Fund account, perhaps the state could think about spending some of them on fixing a few roads?”
According to O’Donnell, this was one of the two straws that broke the camel’s back when it came to making a decision to run for office.
“The fact that the incumbent Secretary of State seems to think that elections belong to her and not the people, is reason enough on its own to run in an effort to restore integrity to Colorado elections. But the fact that she doesn’t care about redirecting taxpayer funds for no good reason, really has me fired up,” O’Donnell said.
For more information about Mike O’Donnell and his platform to be the next Colorado Secretary of State, please visit https://mikeodonnell.us.
