The day before Colorado’s primary election, the former juvenile detention center that now serves as La Plata County’s election headquarters buzzes with activity.
Election judges move between rooms filled with machines that sort, scan and tabulate ballots. Every step has been carefully designed by La Plata County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee to ensure that each ballot is accurately counted and every vote can be traced through the process.
That process relies on dozens of overlapping safeguards, including bipartisan staffing, repeated ballot counts, continuous video surveillance, signature verification and postelection audits.
Each step is monitored by bipartisan teams, with no employee ever left alone with ballots. The building is under continuous video surveillance, and even custodial staff members are barred from entering election work areas until processing is complete, Lee said.
Election judges are paid employees rather than volunteers, and each of them undergo background checks in order to be approved for the work.
Bipartisan teams of two collect ballots from drop-boxes and post offices. The ballots are placed into sealed containers with unique seal numbers and brought to the election facility.
Lee is constantly changing the partnerships to ensure there is no time for personal relationships and camaraderie to develop between teammates, thus ensuring another level of protection against any untoward behavior.
Once ballots arrive, they begin moving through a series of checkpoints where they are counted, sorted and counted again.
“We count and count and count and count,” Lee said. It ensures that the same number of ballots move through each step of the process and everything remains accounted for, she said.
Before a ballot can be opened, election officials verify the person who returned it.
The county’s envelope-sorting machine – The Falcon – scans the bar code on the return envelope that is unique to each voter, photographs the return envelope and captures an image of the signature.
Election staff members verify signatures by comparing the signature on the envelope with signatures already on file from driver’s licenses, previous elections and other official records.
If judges cannot confidently determine whether a signature matches, the ballot moves to a second review by a two-person team composed of a Republican and a Democrat.
Voters whose signatures are rejected receive notice and have eight days after Election Day to respond and cure their signature so their ballot can still be counted. If they don’t respond, Lee said she passes the ballots to the district attorney as a potential case.
She said her office also audits the work of signature judges throughout the election, monitoring acceptance and rejection rates to identify judges who may be applying standards too loosely or too strictly.
Only after a voter’s identity has been verified are ballot envelopes opened.
In a room labeled the “The Poker Room,” teams made up of Republican, Democratic and unaffiliated election judges sit at so-called “poker tables” and recount each batch. They remove a ballot from its envelope and verify the contents before separating the ballot from the identifying envelope.
Once that separation occurs, the ballot can no longer be connected to the voter who cast it, Lee said.
During primary elections, judges also verify that unaffiliated voters returned only one partisan ballot. If both a Republican and Democratic ballot are voted and returned, both ballots are rejected under state law. If one ballot is voted and the second is blank, the voted ballot is counted while the blank ballot is documented and set aside.
Election judges document empty return envelopes, damaged ballots and other irregularities, assigning each a specific rejection code to maintain a record of all decisions made.
Since the 2020 election, Colorado’s mail voting system and electronic tabulation equipment have faced increased scrutiny, largely the result of baseless misinformation, as some political leaders and candidates have questioned the security of the state’s election process and called for changes, including a return to hand-counting ballots.
James Wiley, the Republican nominee for Colorado secretary of state, has campaigned on claims that the state’s elections need stronger safeguards and voiced support for former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, an election denier convicted of election interference who was released from prison June 1 after Gov. Jared Polis commuted her nine-year sentence.
La Plata County uses Dominion’s Liberty Vote system to tabulate ballots. The tabulators are not connected to the internet and communicate with the county’s server through hard-wired connections.
Before each election, the county conducts public logic and accuracy tests, during which representatives from the major political parties mark and hand-count test ballots before comparing those totals with the machine tabulation. The equipment cannot be used until the results match.
Lee said the tabulators consistently produce accurate counts and are less prone to human error than manual tallies.
“Machines are programmed to read one thing,” she said. “The human brain doesn’t work that way. … The equipment doing the tabulation doesn’t make those kinds of mistakes.”
Election judges working in the tabulation room said the system’s multiple layers of oversight make it difficult for ballots to be added, removed or counted twice without being detected. Ballots are reconciled at every stage of processing, and any discrepancy between physical ballots and electronic records stops the count until the issue is resolved.
As ballots are scanned, the system captures front and back images of each ballot and creates a digital cast vote record showing how each contest was interpreted. Each ballot is also marked with a batch number, ballot number, date and time, allowing auditors to locate the corresponding paper ballot without revealing the identity of the voter.
If a batch jams or is scanned incorrectly, election workers can discard the scan and rerun the batch before it is accepted into the official totals. Because every batch is tracked throughout the process, duplicate scans or missing batches are immediately identified during reconciliation.
After the election, the county conducts a risk-limiting audit using the paper ballots to verify the electronic tabulation.
Lee said she has heard criticisms that election officials are just “filling in the ballots themselves.” To prohibit that from happening, all pen colors except red are prohibited from the “The Poker Room,” she said. The ballot scanner cannot read red ink.
Lee has run the show for years and said she has turned over and over in her head the points in the process where voter fraud could occur, and she just can’t imagine a scenario where it does.
“I have nothing but confidence. I feel very strongly about how we’re doing, and I’m always refining the process,” she said.
Election records are retained for 25 months before they can be destroyed, allowing audits and recounts long after Election Day.
For Lee, the strength of the system lies in its overlapping safeguards and the dedicated team of election judges.
By Monday afternoon, Republican, Democratic and unaffiliated election judges filled the tables in the break room, eating lunch together before returning to work.
“(Look at these) dedicated people of opposite parties sitting together,” Lee said. “It’s just beautiful.”
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