At least a dozen mail ballots were stolen, fraudulently filled out and submitted in Mesa County for the Nov. 5 election in a scheme announced Thursday by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold.
Authorities detected the scheme before most of the ballots were processed, she said. But three were successfully cast after clearing a signature-review process. A fourth ballot nearly made it through, but it was flagged after the legitimate voter received a notification that their ballot had been cast, Griswold said.
Election officials cannot retrieve the three fraudulent ballots, Griswold said, and they will be counted.
The ballots were all completed, including with a required signature on the back of the return envelope, and submitted via U.S. Postal Service boxes, rather than ballot drop-box locations.
Officials said the issue was identified via the signature verification process. Mesa County uses an electronic signature verification process, comparing it to signatures on file, and election judges also manually check the signatures on the back of the envelopes at times.
In the case of the three ballots that were accepted for counting, all were kicked out for further review by the automatic signature verification system; they were then accepted by an election judge, said Jack Todd, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, after a news conference Thursday afternoon in Denver. He added that secondary review by a human judge isn’t unusual.
The verification process caught other suspected fraudulent ballots and launched a broader review in Mesa County, Griswold said. Despite three ballots making it through the system, she and Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the incident was an example of the election system working.
“in those four cases, their three ballots were actually submitted and not pulled out. And that’s unfortunate, but very luckily, this fraud was found early in the process in Mesa County, and action was taken,” she said.
The affected ballots were all stolen from addresses within a close geographic proximity, Griswold told reporters. Voters who had their ballots stolen — including those three whose ballots were successfully cast and will be counted — will still be able to vote.
Griswold said her office learned about the scheme Wednesday, a day after Mesa County officials identified it. She would not comment on when the ballots were believed to have been stolen, nor would she comment on whether the ballots were cast in favor of one political candidate or party or another. She would not comment on whether anyone has been arrested or if authorities have identified a suspect or suspects.
A criminal investigation in Mesa County is underway, Griswold said. The Mesa County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. The U.S. Postal Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Griswold said another issue was under investigation elsewhere in the state. Todd said later that the situation was similar and that he believed a local agency was investigating, but no other details were available.
Now serving her second term in office, Griswold, a Democrat, has frequently defended the security of Colorado’s mail-voting system, in which ballots are mailed to all active voters several weeks before the election. Griswold and Crane again sought Thursday to reassure voters, despite the fraud, that the state’s elections are safe and secure.
“At the end of the day, our system is done by humans. It’s done by people who are overseeing the entire Colorado election model,” Griswold said. “Two big things: We’re going to continue to work very closely with the Mesa County clerk to ensure compliance with our electoral law, but that also the system did work.”
Mesa County, home to Grand Junction, has been at the center of past concerns around elections in recent years, centered on former Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who helped spread rampant false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 election.
She was convicted of criminal charges in August and sentenced to nine years in prison and jail for her role in a data breach scheme that involved other election deniers. Prosecutors said she allowed a man to access the county’s election system using someone else’s security badge and deceived other people about his identity.
Staff writer Nick Coltrain contributed to this story.