Colorado election officials from both major parties say a typically innocuous step in the certification of vote totals has increasingly been seized upon by activists to cast doubt over state elections.
Since 2020, a small but growing number of county canvass boards have had Republican members refuse to sign off on vote tallies, according to state records. Those objections haven’t jeopardized the actual certification of elections, and Colorado’s system has additional processes in place to stop rogue canvass boards from preventing the finalizing of results.
But it serves as an ill omen of potential efforts to sow distrust in voting heading into this year’s primary and general elections, several state and county election officials said in interviews with The Denver Post.
The canvass, completed after each election by a bipartisan county board made up of the clerk and the appointees of the local Republican and Democratic party chairs, largely serves as a check that there weren’t more ballots counted than cast. Following the state’s March 5 presidential primaries, Republican board members in Boulder, El Paso and Jefferson counties along the Front Range refused to sign off on the canvass.
Last fall, after the state’s general election, Republican members in those counties — along with Larimer, home of Fort Collins, and La Plata, home of Durango — likewise declined to sign off on the canvass, according to records from the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office.
Officials said the cited reasons, including a distrust of signature verification processes or the chain of custody for certain types of ballots, were specious and fell outside the canvass boards’ purview.
Colorado’s top election official expressed concern that the complaints could serve as fodder for claims that damage some voters’ trust in election integrity.
“If there’s a reasonable reason for a canvass board not to sign off, we absolutely want to know that,” said Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. “But trying to spread disinformation through our election itself, without basis, is disappointing.”
While Boulder County’s Republican party has a decade-long history of declining to sign off on the results, such protest votes have become a new — though suddenly routine, since the 2020 election — event in El Paso and Jefferson counties.
These new stands have followed widespread, baseless accusations of election fraud spread by former President Donald Trump, who’s likely to be Republicans’ nominee again in this year’s presidential election.
After the November election, the Colorado Republican Party sent out a statement by former state Rep. Ron Hanks, now a congressional candidate, discouraging county canvass boards from certifying the election.
Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association and a former Republican clerk of Arapahoe County, called the reasons that have been cited by dissenting canvass members “complete fabricated garbage.”
“We’re grateful it’s not more counties, but it’s concerning anytime people want to play political games or score cheap political points with our elections,” Crane said.
Part of “election deniers’ playbook”?
The practice appears to be part of a growing “election deniers’ playbook,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a public policy institute at New York University’s School of Law.
Local canvass boards in New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina voted in 2022 not to certify their local elections, according to ProPublica. All of those elections were eventually certified, sometimes under court order.
Colorado election code specifies limited duties for canvass boards: to certify the official abstract of votes, by reconciling the number of ballots counted with the number cast, and the number of ballots cast with the number of people who voted; to observe post-election audits; and to conduct recounts, if necessary.
The election code specifies it is not the board’s role to determine voter intent or eligibility or to request new reports. Those duties are typically reserved for election judges.
Boulder County’s Republican Party has repeatedly rejected the canvass since 2012, with members typically citing concerns with a “bogus” signature verification process. Former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, had to step in to certify the canvass in 2014, when a majority of conservative board members refused to certify the canvass there.
One of the more recent canvass board dissenters in Colorado, Candice Stutzriem in El Paso County, has expressed past concerns about undocumented immigrants voting in elections.
In an interview with The Post, Stutzriem said she has a good relationship with Steve Schleiker, the county’s clerk and a fellow Republican. But she views the canvass board’s job as adversarial, in order to keep elections honest, and she decried that “the role of the canvass board member has been dumbed down” to just “matching numbers.”
She voiced concerns about ballot and signature verification, even if she’s watched the bipartisan election judges and says she trusts them.
“It’s validation. We’re unable to validate those ballots,” she said. “But it passes. It’s the system that we have because of all-mail-in voting and it’s how it’s done.”
Stutzriem said her decision not to certify the March presidential primary was “based entirely on the actions” of Griswold and the secretary’s statements about Trump in the recent 14th Amendment lawsuit by voters seeking to bar him from the ballot. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Trump was ineligible under the insurrection clause in December, but the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the challenge last month.
Trump handily won the state’s Republican presidential primary, but Stutzriem suggested it would have been more decisive without Griswold’s comments in support of the challenge.
Despite her concerns, Stutzriem still votes, though she says she does so in person rather than by mail.
Schleiker, who was elected El Paso County’s clerk and recorder in 2022, noted that Stutzriem signed off on individual components related to certification, but not the whole canvass.
“A group of individuals are trying to make a political statement where this is not the place to make a political statement,” Schleiker said in an interview. “This is not the process to make a political statement.”
He and other clerks called these types of protests an insult to the community members they depend upon to run the elections.
In Jefferson County, Republican canvass board member Nancy Pallozzi, who voted against the presidential primaries’ certification, didn’t return a request for comment.
She was complimentary to the election workers and staff in the clerk’s office in her final report — while still refusing to sign off on the vote tallies. She cited concerns with signature verification and the chain of custody for undeliverable mail ballots.
Worries about erosion of trust by voters
Jefferson County Clerk Amanda Gonzalez, a Democrat, said she tried to address what concerns she could from those raised by Pallozzi, even if they fell outside the canvass board’s scope.
Pallozzi even acknowledged the clerk’s effort in her report following the presidential primary. But she didn’t see the chain of custody for undeliverable ballots, which she wrote was her “sole reason” for not signing off.
Those are ballots that were never cast and never voted on — and thus not part of the canvass process, Gonzalez said.
“The potential harm in these kinds of things is it sends the signal that the chair, or the party she represents, doesn’t trust our elections, even though her objections aren’t grounded in her responsibilities,” Gonzalez said.
If people don’t trust the process, they may not vote, Gonzalez said. But she’s confident most people do trust the election process, she said, as evidenced by the dozens of Republican election workers her office relies on to run the elections as part of bipartisan teams.
The clerks and other election officials said they’d continue to encourage people to learn more about their local elections and to sign up to help run them, in the hopes of dispelling persistent myths about the process.
Crane, from the clerks’ association, argued that the right to vote, which Americans have fought and even died for, should be above the partisan fray. He promised a “very aggressive” public education campaign ahead of the state’s June primary for non-presidential races and the November general election.
“The same people who think Jena Griswold is too political in her role — and that she should just call balls and strikes fairly — these are the same people who refuse to sign off on the canvass process because of some grievance they have,” Crane said. “At the end of the day, they’re no different and no better than the things they’re criticizing.”
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