October 24, 2024 02:42 PM UTC

Don't Even Try It: Attempted Vote Fraud In Mesa County Stopped Cold

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reports, an apparent attempt to fraudulently cast as many as two dozen ballots by persons other than the intended voters has been intercepted by the state’s voter signature verification system in Mesa County–where, as readers know, the former county clerk is now cooling her heels in county jail at the beginning of nine years locked up for her own ill-fated monkeying with election systems:

The fraudulent ballots were discovered because of signature verification rules and, BallotTrax, the app the state uses to notify voters when their ballots are mailed to them and when they are received by their county clerks.

In the case of several of these, the Mesa County Clerk’s Office noticed a number of returned ballots where signatures did not match. In such cases, election officials send a “cure letter” to voters asking them to verify their signatures, Griswold said.

Some voters who received those letters contacted the clerk’s office to say that they not only hadn’t voted, but hadn’t received their ballot…

In a press conference today, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold praised the speedy identification of the suspected fraudulent ballots, demonstrating that the system works and is able to detect attempts at election fraud even at a small scale:

“Colorado’s elections are secure, and this attempt at fraud was found and was investigated quickly because of all the tools we have in place,” Griswold told The Daily Sentinel. “Every return-by-mail ballot undergoes signature verification, which compares the signature on the ballot to the signature of the voter on file. We also have tools like ballot curing and ballot tracking, both of which help bring a situation to light.”

We don’t know yet how these roughly two dozen ballots were obtained and voted by someone other than the voters on file, but it most likely wasn’t easy. And even though a couple of dozen ballots are unlikely to affect even small local races, the penalty for fraudulently casting them is life-changing: a felony conviction with up to three years in prison for each fraudulent ballot. The stiff penalty for a crime with so little upside should be enough to deter any rational actor from attempting what is alleged to have happened here. And in all but a tiny number of cases, it does.

In our experience covering the exceedingly rare instances of election fraud since Colorado adopted mail ballots in 2013, the overwhelmingly majority of cases have been Republicans like the former chairman of the Colorado GOP Steve Curtis who found out the hard way that the rumors of a system ripe for abuse are false. We’ll be therefore watching closely to see who is ultimately charged in this case and what their political leanings are.

If the past is any predictor, it’ll be another Republican so convinced that voter fraud is everywhere they prove it themselves.