A Republican bill to require Colorado's secretary of state to purge voter rolls of suspected noncitizens died Wednesday at the hands of Democrats, who said it could take away the right to vote based on faulty data.

House Bill 1050, sponsored by state Rep. Lori Saine, R-Dacono, would have required the secretary of state to electronically cancel the registrations of voters who, after their names had been run through a U.S. Department of Homeland Security database, were listed as noncitizens.

"Allowing noncitizens to vote not only disenfranchies the American voter, but it's a great disservice to those who are trying the best they can to navigate this process to become a U.S. citizen," said Saine, who said that even accidental registrations of noncitizens can jeopardize their efforts to become citizens.

The issue of noncitizen voters was put in the spotlight last year by Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, whose office said at one point there could be as many as 11,000 noncitizens registered and as many as 4,000 of those noncitizens had voted.

But those numbers were whittled down considerably in the course of Gessler's own investigation, which later found that of 1,416 registered voters run through a federal database, only 141 were listed as noncitizens, and of those, only 35 had voted at some point.

And, as The Denver Post and other news organizations found, some of those 35 actually were U.S. citizens. Secretary of State officials say updated numbers put the total of suspected noncitizens registered at 436.

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Gessler's office received criticism that he was on "witch hunt" for illegal immigrant voters and that letters sent out to these voters asking them to verify their citizenship amounted to voter intimidation tactics.

"We feel that we acted very judiciously," said Suzanne Staiert, deputy secretary of state, adding that the department did not enact voter removal procedures.

"It certainly was not the department's intent in any way to intimidate voters," Staiert said.

But two people who got the letters, and who are U.S. citizens, also testified at the hearing, with one of them referrring to Gessler's efforts as an "immigrant witch hunt."

State Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, was among those who questioned the accuracy of the federal "SAVE" database that is used by Homeland Security. Salazar pointed to statements Gessler himself made recently while speaking publicly that federal databases are "riddled with errors."

"I don't think that there is a large number of undocumented individials, or at least noncitizens, who are voting in our election system and certainly the evidence has borne that out," Salazar said.

The committee defeated the bill on a 7-3 party-line vote.

Tim Hoover: 303-954-1626, thoover@denverpost.com or twitter.com/timhoover