Rigging vote? Almost no way in Colorado

Let’s say you want to rig the outcome of the presidential election or another statewide race in Colorado.

Step 1: Pack a lunch … and a dinner … and a snack and a breakfast and a second lunch and four more weeks of food because you’re going to be at it for at least a month in dozens of counties and will have to evade hundreds of people from across the political spectrum trying to stop you.

This is the reality of election rigging in the state, a worry suddenly receiving a lot more attention after GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump floated the idea that voting results nationally

could be manipulated against him. Members of Colorado’s congressional delegation on Thursday ridiculed the notion of a tainted election.

“This type of rhetoric is absurd,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Aurora, “and I have faith in the American people and in our election system.”

“The allegations of rampant election fraud are really irresponsible because they undermine the public’s faith in the most open and democratic system in the world,” U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, said.

In Colorado, there are multiple layers of checks and rechecks and multiple groups of poll watchers, election monitors and vote count-verifiers who work to ensure an accurate election, those involved in the process say.

“It’s not that these events never occur,” Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams said of the potential for attempted voter fraud. “It’s that we catch them.”

Start with the big picture. There isn’t really one, single, hackable Colorado election system. There are 64 separate systems — one in each Colorado county — which are overseen by independent officials and use one of five different brands of voting machines and have their results reconciled by local, bipartisan canvass boards.

Pam Anderson, a former clerk in Jefferson County who is now the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said county clerks start with their fraud precautions well before ballots go out with tests of their voting and tabulating machines — equipment that Anderson said is not connected to the internet, is subject to random audit by the secretary of state’s office and is stored under lock and key and anti-tamper seal.

On Election Day, paper records of votes are saved, chain-of-custody documents for ballots are created, video surveillance of vote-counting is captured, and election monitors from both major parties are welcomed to watch the process, Anderson said. And then, after the election comes, more checking — another round of machine tests and the reconciliation by the canvass board, which makes sure that the number of votes counted matches up with the number of ballots cast.

Those final results are then sent to the secretary of state’s office, which can investigate further if there are concerns before finally certifying the election. According to the office’s official election calendar, the whole process can last into December.

“There are a lot of checks and balances,” Anderson said. “I think a lot of election officials will tell you that all elections are local.”

This isn’t to say that Anderson and Williams think there’s no risk for tampering or mistakes on a small scale. There have been reports of votes being cast in the names of dead voters. Williams said that, in 2014, there were 10,000 mail ballots cast where the signature couldn’t be verified or wasn’t provided. But that was out of 2 million votes statewide.

The state’s widespread use of mail ballots — 95 percent of votes cast in 2014 were on mail ballots — add other concerns. Mary Eberle, an election-integrity advocate in Boulder County who formerly served on that county’s canvass board, said the mail ballot system makes it impossible to know how many times voters fill out ballots that never make it to the clerk’s office to be counted — though voters can check for themselves online to see if their ballot has been received.

“There’s so much of the first part of the election that is uncheckable,” she said.

Eberle was among a majority of Boulder County canvass board members who voted not to certify certain election results in 2012 and 2014 over concerns that the board hadn’t been provided enough data to verify the result. The secretary of state’s office looked into the concerns and ultimately certified the results, but Eberle said the disputes show how important the canvass boards’ work is.

“It’s a heavy-duty responsibility to be on the canvass board,” she said.

It’s that kind of commitment to integrity that caused other members of Colorado’s congressional delegation to stand behind the fairness of the system.

“Irresponsible and dangerous,” is how U.S. Rep. Ed Perlmutter, a Democrat, referred to speculation about a rigged election. When a spokesman for Republican U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn was asked whether Lamborn shared concerns about potentially manipulated election results, he said the congressman’s answer was a blunt one: “No.”