{"id":25116,"date":"2024-10-29T14:52:48","date_gmt":"2024-10-29T20:52:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-election-clerks-working-to-calm-public-concerns\/"},"modified":"2024-10-29T20:52:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-29T20:52:48","slug":"colorado-election-clerks-working-to-calm-public-concerns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-election-clerks-working-to-calm-public-concerns\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado election clerks working to calm public concerns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Dana
Dana Evans, a Durango deputy city clerk, center, assists election judges, from left, Buck Skillen, Roger Anderson, Trish Pegram and Roy Petersen as they process ballots after a morning of training in April 2015. La Plata County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee Parker, left, was on hand to help with the training. (Jerry McBride\/Durango Herald file)<\/span>du1-i-syn<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Colorado election officials said they are ramping up their vigilance even more in the wake of revelations of criminal voter fraud in Mesa County.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have clerks across the state going back and revisiting all of their processes, all of their procedures, and having a zero-tolerance policy for any mistakes,\u201d said Matt Crane, the head of the Colorado County Clerks Association.<\/p>\n

Authorities in Mesa County are looking for whoever stole and fraudulently submitted a dozen mail ballots earlier this month. Some of the ballots were stopped during the signature verification process, which matches the signature on the envelope with what\u2019s on file for the voter but three of the fraudulent ballots were accepted and counted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way the system is designed, it is designed to catch things like this, which it did,\u201d Crane said. \u201cNow, obviously, it is regrettable that three got through.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mesa County has been at the forefront of election security debates in Colorado for years. The county\u2019s former Republican clerk, Tina Peters, was convicted<\/a> of violating state law in her effort to try and uncover voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. She was recently sentenced to nine years in prison.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s frustrating to continue to see Mesa County in the news over an election matter,\u201d said Republican Rep. Matt Soper of Delta, whose district includes a large portion of the county.<\/p>\n

Still, Soper acknowledged that this recent instance is in some ways a good news story.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey actually caught ballots that were being fraudulently voted,\u201d he said. \u201cI found it pretty remarkable that they caught these ballots. Kudos to the staff and the election officials that caught this.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Soper thinks there\u2019s room for improvement when it comes to signature verification. He\u2019d like to see the scope of signatures on file for a particular voter expanded so there are more data points for election judges to review, something the clerk\u2019s association said they\u2019d be open to as well.<\/p>\n

The association\u2019s current chair, Boulder County clerk, Democrat Molly Fitzpatrick, describes signature verification as arguably one of the most important cornerstones of the state\u2019s election model. She said clerks have already been working on a pilot project to standardize how they evaluate the reliability of signature verification judges across the state.<\/p>\n

\u201cCounties are required to audit judges, so we just want to get even better at it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick said that while it\u2019s deeply unfortunate that three fraudulent ballots were counted, the bigger picture is that even more stolen ballots were caught early on because of the systems that were in place. The three that did make it through were flagged by a computer system that checks signatures but eventually approved by a human judge. The Colorado Secretary of State\u2019s office said in a press briefing on Thursday that that election worker has since been reassigned.<\/p>\n

Fitzpatrick said she does not doubt that Mesa County\u2019s clerk, Bobbie Gross, will be examining the procedures in place for her office\u2019s signature judges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was their training like? Were they experienced? Were they new? How were they being audited? Those are all things that are legitimate questions that I would be looking at if I were the county clerk.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clerks who spoke with CPR News all said, as unfortunate as it is, the Mesa County situation shows that Colorado has appropriate safeguards in place. Fremont County Clerk Justin Grantham, a Republican, said he had a short meeting on Friday with his signature verification judges to inform them about what happened and reiterate that if there are discrepancies with a signature it\u2019s very important to ask questions and take a second look.<\/p>\n

Fremont does all of its signature verifications manually, unlike Mesa County, which first starts with an automated review.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s never going to be full proof, there\u2019s human error,\u201d said Grantham. But he urged the public: \u201cTrust that the judges have the best intent on what they\u2019re doing, and they\u2019re doing their job as adequately as they can.\u201d<\/p>\n

La Plata County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee said her signature verification team was made aware of the situation in Mesa County and is on high alert for signs of fraud locally, but nothing has change procedurally from what she has been doing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel really solid about our processes and didn\u2019t have to make significant changes,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n

La Plata County relies 100% on human verification. The county also does audits, in which a separate team from the signature verification team comes in to audit work of other teams to look for discrepancies.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor our size county, I feel that what we\u2019re doing \u2013 with the visual (verification) \u2013 it works,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n

While the Mesa case highlights the risk of invalid signatures slipping through, Colorado\u2019s election system has also been criticized in the past for rejecting too many possibly valid signatures. A CPR investigation found that younger voters and voters from areas with more people of color are disproportionately likely to have their ballots rejected.<\/p>\n

Weld County clerk, Republican Carly Koppes, who\u2019s worked in elections for 20 years, said there have always been attempts to fraudulently vote, and that counties have been pretty successful at blocking them.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s saddening and disappointing\u201d to see people try to cheat the voting system, said Koppes, \u201cbecause we expect more from our community.\u201d<\/p>\n

A former state GOP chair living in Weld County was caught fraudulently submitting his ex-wife\u2019s ballot in 2016. He was sentenced to four years probation and 300 hours of community service.<\/p>\n

As clerks continue to combat election mis- and disinformation, Koppes said she hopes that what happened in Mesa County might actually help bolster voter confidence, if people look at it from the perspective of election administrators.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Hey, our checks and balances really do work and our processes are solid.\u2019 And that, obviously, every time any type of situation like this does happen, us clerks and the officials across the state and even the nation are going to review and continue to get better as well, because that\u2019s just what we do, especially in Colorado,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

Herald Deputy Editor Shane Benjamin contributed to this report<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ballot fraud rattles some voters, but experts say signature verification process worked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25117,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[266,28,308,1621],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-25116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-election","tag-headlines","tag-local-elections","tag-voting"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25116\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25116"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=25116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}