Nine days after the primary election in Colorado, the last ballots were still being counted around the state, including in Boulder County.
After a batch of ballots was fed through a scanner next to a desktop computer in a room of low cubicles, a worker stacked them in one section of a cardboard box next to the scanner. Two election judges, one Republican and one Democrat, emerged from behind a glass partition asking to see one of those ballots, identified by a unique number each one is assigned as it’s run through the scanner.
The voting system had flagged the ballot because the scanner had detected it was blank. The image on a screen the judges were monitoring showed the ovals next to the candidates’ names were empty. Sometimes ovals filled in with red ink can be read as blanks but a look at the paper ballot confirmed a voter had returned the ballot without voting for any candidates. The judges — Democrat Greg Pine and Republican Randy Paddock — both agreed there were no votes to count, so the counting process resumed.
Earlier in the day, the pair had also reviewed a ballot in which a voter had placed tiny dots in the ovals on one side of the ballot that could not be read by the machines. Both judges agreed those dots were votes because of the pattern.
“We have to look and see if they’re consistent or not,” Pine said in an interview after the count was finished.
This is as close to a hanging chad as Colorado gets with an election system that relies on a combination of technology and human judgment to count paper ballots delivered by mail.
The highly regulated, bipartisan process by which votes are examined and tabulated in Boulder County and other county election offices is expected to come under intense scrutiny again this general election year — perhaps more than ever.
For nearly six years, President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked states’ voting processes, especially mail-in ballot systems like Colorado’s, despite no proof that such systems have failed or have improperly impacted the results of an election. He has advanced claims about hidden ballots and illegal voters since his 2020 presidential loss and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. This week, though, some evidence of illegal voting did emerge in New Jersey. Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the state mistakenly registered 6,600 noncitizens to vote between 2023 and 2024, with hundreds of them casting ballots.
Over the past few weeks, Trump’s goal of gaining more authority over the country’s voting systems — and sowing doubt in the integrity of state results — reached a new gear. This month, he forced out the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency created after the disputed 2000 presidential election to help strengthen and secure election administration. He also used a nationwide speech to again cast doubt on U.S. elections, saying electronic voting systems had vulnerabilities that foreign actors could exploit.
In March, Trump issued an executive order directing the creation of a federal voter list and telling the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to voters on that list, though a federal judge has blocked key parts of the plan. Colorado lawmakers, meanwhile, moved to mail ballots for November’s election seven days earlier and also came up with a process to handle any potential search warrants for ballots.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who doesn’t think the Trump order will take effect, said those new steps built upon seven years of changes to fortify the state’s election system.
“The State of Colorado is prepared, and Colorado voters will be able to cast a ballot by mail, at a drop box, or in person this November and beyond,” she said in a statement.
Whether ground is being laid by the president to challenge midterm election results or not, Colorado county clerks say they believe the protocols they have in place are strong. This June’s primary election gave many counties including Boulder a test run of tabulating and certifying close races, a process The Colorado Sun was allowed to observe.
But that doesn’t mean everyone has accepted them.
On Monday, Boulder County elections officials announced the results of its post-election audit that they said showed “zero discrepancies” in the election results.
But when it came to certifying the results, Boulder County officials said, two members of the three-person canvass board certified the election results with David Brown, the board’s sole Republican representative, declining to. Brown explained later that he objected to the secretary of state’s election procedures, which he said rely on trust in too many areas.
“We need reform. This is a crooked election system that we have,” said Brown, the county party’s vice chair, who is concerned ballots sent to incorrect addresses could be used by people they weren’t mailed to, among other things.
Refusing to certify has been a fairly common position among Republican members of Boulder County’s board since at least 2012. Since Trump claimed he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, the refusal to certify has spread to several other counties. Members of canvass boards in at least four other counties — Arapahoe, Douglas, El Paso and Jefferson — refused to certify the primary election results, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
Boulder County Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick said the issues Brown raised are outside the scope of the canvass board’s role in certifying an election. She said Republicans’ refusal to sign off on elections are based on “vague objections that have no factual basis.”
The last ballots are counted
For more than eight days, the Republican gubernatorial primary race had remained too close to call between state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer and political upstart Victor Marx. The race came down to counting ballots coming back from overseas, including those from military service members, and assessing ballots that had been flagged for special review because of discrepancies.
The ballots counted on the ninth day after an election are typically the last to be tallied.
While most voters need to return their ballots by 7 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, members of the military and overseas residents have up until the eighth day after the election to return their ballots.
Among those counted last are also ballots that came in on time but had a problem, like a signature on the ballot envelope that didn’t appear to match signatures on file.
First-time voters are also supposed to provide a copy of their identification with their mail-in ballot. Voters whose signatures couldn’t be confirmed or didn’t include an ID are notified and given up to eight days after the election to fix or “cure” the problem by presenting identification or confirming with officials that they had really cast the ballot. They can do that online through the Secretary of State’s Office or email information to the county clerk’s office by midnight on the eighth day. They can also correct it in person.
In Boulder, there were 19 ballots “cured” in the final hours that were added to those being counted on the ninth day along with about 1,500 ballots held back on purpose to be counted with the last-minute ballots to ensure that no one would be able to determine which votes might have made the difference in a close race.
Molly Halsey, Boulder County’s ballot processing manager, pulled the last cured ballots out of a red bin and ran them through a ballot sorter in three separate batches: unaffiliated, Democratic and Republican, of which there was only one. The ballots shot through the machine, passing a camera which snapped a photo of the signature on the outside of the envelope.
The sorter has the capability of assessing voters’ signatures but Boulder County still leaves that to humans to analyze. Election judges sitting nearby at computers compare the signatures from every envelope to those the county has on file from official records. The judges are trained to look for similarities including how people slant and space their letters. If the judges can’t confirm that a voter’s ballot signature looks like other signatures on file, the voters will be notified that they need to “cure” their ballot.
The ballots were then taken upstairs to the second floor where workers examined them along with other ballots and got them ready for scanning and tabulation.
Security cameras in the ceiling run around the clock during election season. Security badges are required to enter a room to keep track of who has been where.
First the ballots are run through one of several machines with nicknames like “Rapido” and “Zoom-Zoom” which quickly slice off the side of the envelope. Then they’re taken to teams of election judges sitting around folding tables who separate the ballots from the envelopes. Without signed envelopes the ballots can’t be linked to voters, ensuring voter confidentiality.
The workers look for any damage to the ballot, like rips or spilled coffee, or problems with the way the ballot is filled, such as with a pencil instead of ink or marked with X’s or check marks rather than filled in ovals.
The judges at one table noticed one ballot’s ovals were filled in lightly, which might not be detected by the scanners. They set it aside to be tested to see if the scanner could read it. If it can’t be, a bipartisan team will sit at a touch screen nearby and fill out a new ballot, marking it with the voter’s selections, so that it can be read by the scanner.
Roll of the dice
The last safeguard is what election officials call a risk-limiting audit. After all the ballots are counted, bipartisan election judges in all but one Colorado county go back and recheck randomly selected paper ballots against how voting machines tabulated them. Tiny Silverton and surrounding San Juan County, where only 276 ballots were cast, doesn’t need to hold this kind of audit.
To determine which ballots to check against the electronic count, 20 dice were rolled, one at a time, in a conference room at the Secretary of State’s Office earlier this month to pick a series of 20 digits. Those numbers were then used to determine which ballots to pull for audits, based on the unique number printed on each ballot. The public was invited to roll the dice. To ensure the selection is random, multicolored dice were dropped in the top of a clear plastic dice tower.
Each person rolling a die announced the number selected. A staffer repeated the number and then placed the die on a piece of paper next to the dice tower.
Celeste Landry, the Forward Party candidate for secretary of state and a former League of Women Voters volunteer, lined up to take her turn. She said she had watched a video of the first dice roll in 2017, when there was a lot of excitement and a lottery to determine who would get to roll the dice.
This time, she was one of only two members of the public who wanted to participate. The others in line were office employees. She got to roll a dice three times. There was polite applause at the end of the ceremony, which lasted about 10 minutes.
“It was a little bit calmer and less dramatic but still very important,” she said.
During the final vote tabulation in Boulder County, The Colorado Sun witnessed no issues or objections from judges. The process ran smoothly and ballots flagged for discrepancies were studied and quickly cleared through consensus.
The audit after the process showed no issues, according to county officials.
Brown, the Republican who would not certify the Boulder County election results, said his concerns stem from the state’s procedures. He said he wants mail ballots to be tracked better to ensure they don’t end up being sent, for example, to businesses where no one lives where people could use them to vote fraudulently.
Such ballots could be caught by judges reviewing signatures though Brown says that safeguard is not an “exact science.”
He also wants election workers during the audit to be able to crosscheck individual ballots with the machines’ readings or scans, not just a spreadsheet tally of what the machine saw.
As for whether Brown saw any problems with election workers carrying out the state’s procedures and protocols, he did not.
“They’re terrific people and professional and they’re doing exactly what they’re supposed to do,” he said.