Colorado election officials said they are ramping up their vigilance even more in the wake of revelations of criminal voter fraud in Mesa County.
“We 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,” said Matt Crane, the head of the Colorado County Clerks Association.
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's on file for the voter but three of the fraudulent ballots were accepted and counted.
“The way the system is designed, it is designed to catch things like this, which it did,” Crane said. “Now, obviously, it is regrettable that three got through.”
Mesa County has been at the forefront of election security debates in Colorado for years. The county’s former Republican clerk, Tina Peters, was convicted 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.
“It’s frustrating to continue to see Mesa County in the news over an election matter,” said Republican Rep. Matt Soper of Delta, whose district includes a large portion of the county.
Still, Soper acknowledged that this recent instance is in some ways a good news story.
“They actually caught ballots that were being fraudulently voted,” he said. “I found it pretty remarkable that they caught these ballots. Kudos to the staff and the election officials that caught this.”
However, Soper thinks there’s room for improvement when it comes to signature verification. He’d 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’s association said they’d be open to as well.
The association’s current chair, Boulder County clerk, Democrat Molly Fitzpatrick, describes signature verification as arguably one of the most important cornerstones of the state’s 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.
“Counties are required to audit judges, so we just want to get even better at it,” she said.
Fitzpatrick said that while it’s 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’s office said in a press briefing on Thursday that that election worker has since been reassigned.
Fitzpatrick said she does not doubt that Mesa County’s clerk, Bobbie Gross, will be examining the procedures in place for her office’s signature judges.
“What 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.”
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’s very important to ask questions and take a second look.
Fremont does all of its signature verifications manually, unlike Mesa County, which first starts with an automated review.
“It's never going to be full proof, there's human error,” said Grantham. But he urged the public: “Trust that the judges have the best intent on what they're doing, and they're doing their job as adequately as they can.”
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.
“I feel really solid about our processes and didn't have to make significant changes,” Lee said.
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.
“For our size county, I feel that what we're doing – with the visual (verification) – it works,” Lee said.
While the Mesa case highlights the risk of invalid signatures slipping through, Colorado’s 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.
Weld County clerk, Republican Carly Koppes, who’s 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.
“It's saddening and disappointing” to see people try to cheat the voting system, said Koppes, “because we expect more from our community.”
A former state GOP chair living in Weld County was caught fraudulently submitting his ex-wife’s ballot in 2016. He was sentenced to four years probation and 300 hours of community service.
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.
“‘Hey, our checks and balances really do work and our processes are solid.’ 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's just what we do, especially in Colorado,” she said.
To read more stories from Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org.
Herald Deputy Editor Shane Benjamin contributed to this report.
