Colorado election officials say they have thwarted an effort to fraudulently cast votes on a batch of stolen mail ballots in Mesa County.
The scheme was blocked through the state’s 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’t match, election officials reach out to the voter to offer them an opportunity to remedy the situation through a process known as “curing.”
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’s Office that they hadn’t voted. That triggered an investigation and led to the discovery of a dozen stolen and fraudulently cast ballots.
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.
The dozen fraudulently cast ballots were mailed into the Mesa County election office, not returned in drop boxes.
Election Day is Nov. 5. County clerks in Colorado were allowed to begin opening and tabulating ballots on Monday.
Colorado mails ballots to each active, registered voter in the state.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said at a news conference Thursday in Denver that the stolen ballots were “intercepted” 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.
Griswold said she couldn’t comment on whether there was any suspect or suspects in the case, citing the ongoing investigation.
Griswold said she also couldn’t discuss the “political implications” 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.
“We don’t know the motive,” she said.
“This shows the resiliency of our process here in Colorado, that if somebody tries to do nefarious things, it will be discovered through our processes,” Matt Crane, who leads the Colorado County Clerks Association, said at the news conference.
Crane said this is the first time in his roughly 25 years of election administration that he’s 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.
In a written statement, Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross, a Republican, asked for patience.
“I 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,” Cross said. “We 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.”
Griswold said the reason the three fraudulently cast ballots in Mesa County that made it through can’t be pulled from the system has to do with the state’s confidential ballot-casting process.
“Once signatures are checked, the ballot is pulled independently from the envelope and it’s put into the (counting) process,” she said.
In other words, once a ballot is entered into the tabulation process, it’s anonymous and can’t be linked back to the envelope it came in.
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.
Ballot signatures in Colorado are verified by either an automated process or election judges – 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.
In the case of the three ballots that were counted, Mesa County’s 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.
All signatures on ballots cast in Mesa County are now receiving additional scrutiny to prevent more fraudulent votes from being counted.
“The team in Mesa County is reexamining every ballot return envelope that has been received at this point,” Griswold said, adding that she couldn’t definitively say if there were other fraudulently cast ballots in Mesa County that haven’t been discovered yet.
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’t immediately have information to provide on that situation.
“It is very unfortunate that three (fraudulently cast) ballots were counted,” Griswold said, “but this was caught relatively quickly. … The system did work. There is a criminal investigation, and I’m very confident that justice will be (served) in this situation.”
All of the voters affected by the Mesa County fraud will be offered a new ballot.
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.
Mesa County is a Republican-dominated part of the state. It’s 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’s election system.
Peters was sentenced to nine years behind bars, including eight and a half years in prison.
