At least a dozen Colorado ballots were stolen, fraudulently filled out in Mesa County scheme, officials say

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, Griswold said, but it was flagged after the legitimate voter received a notification that their ballot had been cast.

Election officials cannot retrieve the three fraudulent ballots, Griswold said, and they will be counted.

Confirmed voter fraud is rare in Colorado’s nearly all-mail voting system, which has multiple safeguards and checks to detect improper voting. While cases have been prosecuted over the years — including attempts by people to vote using their former or recently deceased spouses’ ballots — the scheme alleged in Mesa County, Griswold indicated, was unprecedented.

All of the fraudulent ballots were 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. At least some of the ballots appeared to have been signed by the same person, Griswold said.

She declined to say whether anyone had been arrested or if any suspects were identified.

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. The signature-verification system helped identify the scale of the issue in Mesa County. Two voters also reached out to election officials after they received notifications to cure ballots — meaning to fix concerns with their signatures — that they hadn’t ever received.

In the case of the three ballots accepted for counting, all had been kicked out for further review by the automatic signature verification system; they were then accepted by the same election judge, said Jack Todd, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office, after a news conference Thursday afternoon in Denver. That judge has been reassigned, Todd said.

He added that secondary review by a human judge isn’t unusual.

Mesa County is home to more than 112,000 active registered voters, according to state data. Despite three ballots making it through the system, Griswold and Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said the incident was an example of the election system working to catch potential fraud.

“The team at Mesa County is reexamining every ballot-return envelope that has been received at this point. The investigation into the situation is ongoing,” Griswold said. “What we also know is that Colorado elections are safe and secure, and this attempt at fraud was found and investigated quickly because of the groundbreaking tools that we have here.”

Griswold said another ballot issue was under investigation elsewhere in the state. Todd said later that the situation was similar to what was identified in Mesa County and that he believed a local agency was investigating. He and Griswold declined to provide additional information.

The affected ballots in Mesa County were all stolen from addresses within a close geographic proximity, Griswold told reporters. Voters who had their ballots stolen — including those whose ballots were successfully cast — 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 a particular political candidate or party.

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.

In a statement sent after Griswold’s press conference, Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Bobbie Gross said she was “fully committed to ensuring the integrity and security of our elections” and that her office is “currently investigating attempted election fraud.”

But Gross, a Republican, criticized Griswold’s decision to reveal the scheme publicly. She said it was “critical that we follow proper procedures to ensure a thorough and effective investigation without tipping off those involved.”

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.