Colorado election officials said they are increasing their vigilance even more in the wake of revelations about criminal voter fraud in Mesa County.

“We have clerks across the state that go back and review all of their processes, all of their procedures and have a zero-tolerance policy for any mistakes,” said Matt Crane, director of the Colorado County Clerks Association.

Authorities in Mesa County are searching for the person who stole and fraudulently mailed a dozen ballots earlier this month. Some of the ballots were stopped during the signature verification process, which matches the signature on the envelope with what’s on file for the voter, but three of the fake ballots were accepted and counted.

“The way the system is designed, it’s designed to catch things like this, which it did,” Crane said. “Now it’s obviously regrettable that three got through.”

Mesa County has been at the forefront of election security debates in Colorado for years. The county’s former Republican clerk, Tina Peters, was sentenced for violating state law in her efforts to try to uncover voter fraud in the wake of the 2020 election. She was recently sentenced to nine years in prison in prison.

“It’s frustrating to continue to see Mesa County in the news on an election issue,” said Republican Rep. Matt Soper of Delta, whose district includes much of the county.

Hart Van Denburg/CPR News

Still, Soper acknowledged that this latest instance is in some ways good news.

“They actually captured ballots that were voted on fraudulently,” he said. “I thought it was pretty remarkable that they got these ballots. Kudos to the staff and election officials who caught this.”

However, Soper believes there is room for improvement when it comes to signature verification. He would like to see the scope of signatures available for a given voter expanded so there are more data points for election judges to review, something the clerks association said they would also be open to.

The association’s current president, Boulder County Clerk Democrat Molly Fitzpatrick, describes signature verification as arguably one of the most important cornerstones of the state’s election model. She said officials have already been working on a pilot project to standardize how they evaluate the reliability of signature verification judges across the state.

“Landscapes are required to review judges, so we just want to get even better at that,” she said.

Fitzpatrick, a Democrat, said that while it is deeply unfortunate that three fraudulent ballots were counted, the bigger picture is that even more stolen ballots were detected early because of the systems in place. The three that made it through were flagged by a computer system that checks signatures but were eventually approved by a human referee. The Colorado Secretary of State’s office said in a press conference Thursday that that election worker has since been reassigned.

Fitzpatrick said she has no doubt Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross will look into the procedures of her office’s signature judge.

“How was their training? Were they experienced? Were they new? How were they vetted? Those are all things that are legitimate questions that I would look at if I were the county clerk.” Clerks who spoke to CPR News all said that as unfortunate as it is, the situation in Mesa County shows that Colorado has adequate safeguards in place.

Fremont County Clerk Justin Grantham, a Republican, said he had a brief meeting Friday with his signature verification judges to inform them of what happened and reiterated that if there are discrepancies with a signature, it is very important to ask questions and take a second look.

Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite

Fremont does all of its signature verifications manually, unlike Mesa County, which first starts with an automated review.

“It’s never going to be full proof, there’s human error,” Grantham said. But he urged the public: “Trust that the judges have the best intentions in what they are doing, and that they are doing their job as well as they can.”