Pat Waak, the chair of the Colorado Democratic Party, has been doing all she can to undermine voter confidence in this election, and, ultimately, her actions could suppress voter turnout.

Her most recent public attack is against Colorado's attorney general, John Suthers, whose office has issued an opinion allowing county clerks to continue to cancel duplicate voter registrations within the 90 days prior to the upcoming election.

From Aug. 1 to Oct. 16, 3,069 duplicate voter registrations were canceled by county clerks within the 90-day window. Waak is accusing Suthers of "taking part in a GOP effort to stop people from voting."

Does Waak really want thousands of voters to have access to multiple ballots for the same election?

My request for the legal opinion from the attorney general's office about the canceled voter registrations stemmed from my desire to make sure that Colorado is fully in compliance with a federal law that limits a state's ability to "systemically remove" the names of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a general election. ("Purging voter list legal, AG says," Oct. 15.)

At the same time, I felt that my instructions to the county clerks on canceling duplicate voter registrations was within the federal law because our new statewide voter system only identifies probable matches of duplicate voter registrations and the system does not cancel a duplicate registration unless the county clerk conducts manual research to determine whether there really is a duplicate match that needs to be canceled or just two individuals with similar identities. If a duplicate match registration is confirmed, the most recent registration is not canceled.

The conclusion of the opinion from the Colorado attorney general's office is that, "The state can remove within 90 days of a primary or general election for a federal office all but the most recent registration of a person who has registered more than once."

No doubt, if a mistake is made and a voter shows up to cast a ballot at a polling place where their voter registration was canceled, they still may cast a provisional ballot and the respective county clerk will have 14 days in which to decide whether the voter's registration was mistakenly canceled.

While Waak is doing all she can to divide the citizens of Colorado, to undermine voter confidence, and to create a highly charged partisan environment of hate and suspicion, my office continues to work quietly behind the scenes to reach out to the representatives of Barack Obama and John McCain, to representatives of both the Democratic and Republican state party organizations, to the governor's office and to the attorney general's office to find constructive solutions and to resolve problems as they arise in a manner that is acceptable to all parties.

I may not be able to achieve positive results on every issue, but my office is getting all of the major parties together to talk to each other and to make every effort to resolve problems early before they develop into large intractable ones.

I would ask Pat Waak to put the interests of Colorado and our nation first, and put her obsessive desire for publicity, at any cost, second.

Mike Coffman is Colorado's secretary of state. He is also the Republican candidate for Congress in the 6th Congressional District.