December 05, 2024 02:45 PM UTC

Three Votes: A Margin Worth Taking To Court

• 3 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

As KOAA News5’s Brett Forrest reports, Colorado last remaining undecided state legislative race, one of the closest such races anyone can remember, is still not fully resolved after a committee of El Paso County election judges narrowed the final tally in the House District 16 race between Democratic incumbent Rep. Stephanie Vigil and Republican Rebecca Keltie to a mere three votes in Keltie’s favor: a margin so narrow that a lack of further review could itself be considered malpractice:

Rep. Steph Vigil previously said she would honor the results of the recount and election, but partially stepped back from her commitment on Thursday.

“The mandatory recount for HD-16 brought this race to a tie. It was only in the process of the canvass board’s review that three Vigil votes were reversed, which therefore tilted the election in Ms Keltie’s favor by three votes. It’s my understanding that the canvass board’s report will be certified by the Secretary of State, which will make Ms Keltie representative-elect for HD-16,” Vigil said in an emailed statement.

“There are legal remedies available to me to investigate possible variables that would return the results to what the recount process initially determined, but I will need to consult with legal experts before making a decision of that magnitude,” Vigil added.

If Rep. Vigil’s version of events is correct and the machine recount resulted in a tie only broken by a hand review of questionable ballots to deliver a three-vote final margin of victory, it is not in any way a “denial” of the election results to ask a court to review that adjudication process to ensure each decision to count or invalidate a particular vote was correct.  Out of some 40,000 ballots cast in total in the HD-16 race, this freakishly close result is the rare case that calls for as exhaustive a review as necessary to ensure the right candidate takes office. And as Rep. Vigil correctly points out in her statement today, if the margin of victory was three votes in Vigil’s favor instead of Rebecca Keltie’s, Keltie would be screaming bloody murder:

In this moment of rising authoritarianism, attacks on democracy, and the scapegoating of minority groups for political gain, it is certainly distressing to see a campaign based on fear and hatred prevail, by any amount; especially by a candidate who’s demonstrated a clear pattern of trafficking in election denial, but is suddenly fully confident in the very system she has repeatedly attacked. [Pols emphasis]

This isn’t idle partisan posturing. Before running for the Colorado House, Rebecca Keltie was a volunteer for the election denial group “U.S. Election Integrity Plan” and an avid promoter of the libelous conspiracy theories about Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems:

Based on this, we do feel comfortable asserting that if the outcome in this three-vote election had gone the other way, Rebecca Keltie would not only be taking the results to court, but openly impugning the results before the court had a chance to examine the facts–something Rep. Vigil scrupulously avoided in her statement. If Rep. Vigil decides to accept these results without further review, that’s her choice. But if Vigil wants a court to ensure this incredibly close result is accurate enough to decide her future, she’s more than within her rights to ask for that, and it does not in any way vindicate Rebecca Keltie’s record of baseless election denialism.

For the rest of us, any time we’re asked in the future if “every vote counts,” this is the story we’re going to tell.