Colorado is currently considering a major piece of legislation to improve the state’s voting laws by implementing Election Day Registration, automatically sending mail ballots to every voter, and creating a real-time voter database to detect and prevent fraud. It passed the House last week and will now be taken up by the Democratic-controlled Senate.

It's a good law and makes sense.  It's even supported by a number of Republican County Clerks and the Colorado County Clerks Association.

But see, conservative Republicans don't want to make it easy to vote.  They have problems getting the vote from minorities, so it's just easier to deny the vote to those minorities, by using Voter ID laws and other impediments to voting.  Among those opposing the new legislation is Scott Gessler, Colorado's Secretary of State.

Now comes a dark money group named the “Citizens for Free and Fair Elections”, which lists its address as that of Gessler’s former firm, the Hackstaff Law Group.  That group is sending out mailers in an attempt to pressure the election clerks into switching their position.  Here it is:

See that photo at the bottom?  That's a stock photo from Getty Images.

Well, not quite.  Here's the actual photo:

It's the same, with two exceptions:

The original photo included a darker-skinned woman in a white hoodie sweatshirt, but the altered version in the mailer took out her face and replaced it with the exact same face of the white woman standing alongside. In addition, a dark-skinned man standing behind her in the photo was removed from the mailer entirely.

No, they're not racist.