{"id":25483,"date":"2024-10-03T12:53:04","date_gmt":"2024-10-03T18:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-clerks-look-to-livestreaming-for-ballot-box-transparency\/"},"modified":"2024-10-03T18:53:04","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T18:53:04","slug":"colorado-clerks-look-to-livestreaming-for-ballot-box-transparency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/colorado-clerks-look-to-livestreaming-for-ballot-box-transparency\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado clerks look to livestreaming for ballot box transparency"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"An
An El Paso County ballot drop off box in the parking lot of the Boot Barn Hall at Bourbon Brothers in Colorado Springs on Oct. 31, 2021 (Julia Fennell\/Colorado Newsline)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

More Colorado counties are considering installing cameras to livestream ballot drop box activity in an effort to increase transparency and dispel voting fraud conspiracies.<\/p>\n

This will be the first presidential election El Paso County has livestream cameras installed at its 42 drop boxes. The county had them in action ahead of last year\u2019s fall municipal elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m giving people the ability to find their own answers,\u201d El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker said. \u201cPeople would bring up \u20182,000 Mules,\u2019 and so I\u2019m like \u2018Here are the tools. Prove it.\u2019 Since I launched these cameras, I have not gotten one report or (Colorado Open Records Act) request.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201c2,000 Mules\u201d is a 2022 conspiracist political film that falsely claimed left-wing groups illegally stuffed drop boxes with ballots for President Joe Biden in 2020. Election deniers point to the film as evidence of widespread voter fraud and vulnerabilities in the election system, especially mail-in ballot systems, but its claims have been debunked<\/a>. Ballot gathering is legal in some form in 35 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In Colorado, people are allowed to collect and return up to 10 ballots.<\/p>\n

\u201cElection officials are facing heightened scrutiny since 2020, and they\u2019re increasingly looking for ways to open up more processes to the public, using transparency to welcome public observation into the process to show that they\u2019re following the law and they\u2019re doing everything they can to run a secure and accurate election,\u201d said Derek Tisler, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice. \u201cLivestreaming in particular, has been a popular tool on this front.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clerks can also use livestreaming technology to show ballot counting, sorting, audits and \u201caspects of the election that have been subject to confusion and rumors,\u201d Tisler said.<\/p>\n

Colorado statute requires 24\/7 video surveillance on the state\u2019s drop boxes. Recordings are subject to the state\u2019s open record law, but those requests can easily rack up thousands of dollars in fees for the requester.<\/p>\n

The difference is that El Paso County now has a system for interested election watchers to monitor people walking or driving up to drop boxes and returning their ballot in real time.<\/p>\n

Each camera, purchased from the Golden-based company Sensera Systems, cost about $5,000 and are standalone with a wireless network and power. The total cost for the cameras was about $176,000, according to the contract between the county and Sensera.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot every county has the budget to afford this kind of technology, but it\u2019s been good for El Paso County,\u201d said Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association. \u201cThis is a way to help build voter confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The cameras also come equipped with night vision and motion detection technology. The streams are publicly available online, and motion-triggered events are uploaded to cloud storage.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy board and I thought this was something that we absolutely needed to do, so we went ahead and invested in it,\u201d Schleiker said.<\/p>\n

Though El Paso County is currently the only county that actively livestreams drop box footage, Pueblo County is looking to implement the practice in the future, according to spokesperson Anthony Mestas. Douglas County is in the installation and testing phase of adding cameras to drop boxes, but there is not a timeline for when they will go live, according to a statement from Clerk Sheri Davis.<\/p>\n

Concerns over mail-in voting and drop box activity are likely to grow among right-wing activists as clerks begin sending ballots to Colorado voters this month. Heidi Ganahl, a Republican who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2022, has called for citizens to physically monitor drop boxes this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very reckless, where she said she\u2019s going to raise money in case they get arrested watching drop boxes,\u201d Crane said. \u201cThere is an ability for watchers to observe boxes, but they aren\u2019t allowed to engage with voters. But what she\u2019s saying implies that they\u2019re planning to go beyond law. That\u2019s dangerous with the tinder boxes that are our elections right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Newsline, visit www.coloradonewsline.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

County spent close to $200k on technology last year<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25484,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[120,266,28,299,1509],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-25483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado","tag-election","tag-headlines","tag-national-elections","tag-state-elections"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25483","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=25483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25483"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=25483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}