{"id":25176,"date":"2024-10-25T03:44:11","date_gmt":"2024-10-25T09:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/scheme-to-cast-votes-on-stolen-mail-ballots-thwarted-by-colorado-election-officials\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T23:11:59","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T05:11:59","slug":"scheme-to-cast-votes-on-stolen-mail-ballots-thwarted-by-colorado-election-officials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/scheme-to-cast-votes-on-stolen-mail-ballots-thwarted-by-colorado-election-officials\/","title":{"rendered":"Scheme to cast votes on stolen mail ballots thwarted by Colorado election officials"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"An
An election official, Barbara Brewer, collects the ballots at the vehicle drop-off location in front of Mesa County Central Services on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021, in Grand Junction. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun file)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Colorado election officials say they have thwarted an effort to fraudulently cast votes on a batch of stolen mail ballots in Mesa County.<\/p>\n

The scheme was blocked through the state\u2019s voter signature verification process, which checks the signatures on mail ballots against the signatures the state has on file for each voter. If the signatures don\u2019t match, election officials reach out to the voter to offer them an opportunity to remedy the situation through a process known as \u201ccuring.\u201d<\/p>\n

When election officials recently reached out to a group of voters to help them cure the signature problems with their ballots, the voters informed the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder\u2019s Office that they hadn\u2019t voted. That triggered an investigation and led to the discovery of a dozen stolen and fraudulently cast ballots.<\/p>\n

Nearly all of votes cast on the dozen stolen ballots were stopped before they were counted. However, three ballots were counted before election officials could pull them from the process because they passed through the signature verification process. Those votes cannot be remedied or removed.<\/p>\n

The dozen fraudulently cast ballots were mailed into the Mesa County election office, not returned in drop boxes.<\/p>\n

Election Day is Nov. 5. County clerks in Colorado were allowed to begin opening and tabulating ballots on Monday.<\/p>\n

Colorado mails ballots to each active, registered voter in the state.<\/p>\n

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said at a news conference Thursday in Denver that the stolen ballots were \u201cintercepted\u201d before they reached the voters who were supposed to receive them. She said all of the ballots were supposed to be received by voters who live in close proximity to each other. Griswold declined to elaborate further citing the criminal investigation into the case.<\/p>\n

Griswold said she couldn\u2019t comment on whether there was any suspect or suspects in the case, citing the ongoing investigation.<\/p>\n

Griswold said she also couldn\u2019t discuss the \u201cpolitical implications\u201d of the case, meaning whether the person or people behind the scheme had a political motivation and what candidates they voted for on the stolen ballots.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know the motive,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"Colorado
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold speaks at a news conference about voting in the 2024 election on Monday, Oct. 21, 2024, at the Denver Elections Division in downtown Denver. (Jesse Paul\/The Colorado Sun)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

\u201cThis shows the resiliency of our process here in Colorado, that if somebody tries to do nefarious things, it will be discovered through our processes,\u201d Matt Crane, who leads the Colorado County Clerks Association, said at the news conference.<\/p>\n

Crane said this is the first time in his roughly 25 years of election administration that he\u2019s seen a situation like this. He encouraged voters to stay vigilant and report any anomalies. Voters can track the status of their ballot at govotecolorado.gov.<\/p>\n

In a written statement, Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross, a Republican, asked for patience.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am fully committed to ensuring the integrity and security of our elections. We are currently investigating attempted election fraud. Our priority is to handle this investigation with the utmost care and diligence, and I believe that prematurely releasing details could compromise our ability to hold those responsible accountable,\u201d Cross said. \u201cWe will share more information when it is responsible to do so. We thank the public for their understanding as we prioritize the security of our elections and the rule of law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Griswold said the reason the three fraudulently cast ballots in Mesa County that made it through can\u2019t be pulled from the system has to do with the state\u2019s confidential ballot-casting process.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce signatures are checked, the ballot is pulled independently from the envelope and it\u2019s put into the (counting) process,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

In other words, once a ballot is entered into the tabulation process, it\u2019s anonymous and can\u2019t be linked back to the envelope it came in.<\/p>\n

For context: There were more than 91,000 ballots cast in Mesa County in 2020. Those three ballots represent 0.003% of the total ballots cast in the county in the last presidential election year.<\/p>\n

Ballot signatures in Colorado are verified by either an automated process or election judges \u2013 or both. If the automatic system or a judge suspects an issue, they advance the ballot to a secondary check where a bipartisan team of judges reviews them.<\/p>\n

In the case of the three ballots that were counted, Mesa County\u2019s automated process flagged the signatures on them for additional review. They were reviewed by a the same, single election judge who advanced them to be tabulated instead of sending them to the bipartisan review process. The judge has been reassigned.<\/p>\n

All signatures on ballots cast in Mesa County are now receiving additional scrutiny to prevent more fraudulent votes from being counted.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe team in Mesa County is reexamining every ballot return envelope that has been received at this point,\u201d Griswold said, adding that she couldn\u2019t definitively say if there were other fraudulently cast ballots in Mesa County that haven\u2019t been discovered yet.<\/p>\n

Clerks statewide have been put on notice to be more vigilant, Crane said. Griswold said another potential case of fraudulent voting is being investigated elsewhere in Colorado but that she didn\u2019t immediately have information to provide on that situation.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is very unfortunate that three (fraudulently cast) ballots were counted,\u201d Griswold said, \u201cbut this was caught relatively quickly. \u2026 The system did work. There is a criminal investigation, and I\u2019m very confident that justice will be (served) in this situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of the voters affected by the Mesa County fraud will be offered a new ballot.<\/p>\n

Crane said election officials work hard to identify signature discrepancies on ballots. Election judges are trained by the state on how to identify anomalies, and some county clerks even go above and beyond that by bringing in a forensic handwriting expert to offer further guidance.<\/p>\n

Mesa County is a Republican-dominated part of the state. It\u2019s been central to election conspiracies peddled by conservatives in recent years, including former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Republican, who was recently convicted in a 2021 security breach of the county\u2019s election system.<\/p>\n

Peters was sentenced to nine years behind bars, including eight and a half years in prison.<\/p>\n

The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. To learn more, go to coloradosun.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

blocked by state\u2019s voter signature verification process<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25177,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[168,266,1503,28,1722,1509],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-25176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-crime","tag-election","tag-fraud","tag-headlines","tag-regional-elections","tag-state-elections"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25176","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=25176"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78829,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25176\/revisions\/78829"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25176"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=25176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}