At least a dozen mail ballots were stolen, fraudulently filled out and submitted in Colorado for the Nov. 5 election, the Colorado secretary of state’s office said Thursday.
Officials said the issue was identified via the signature verification process, which checks the signatures on ballots against those the state has on file for voters.
Authorities said the ballots were mailed into the Mesa County election office via the US Postal Service, not returned in drop boxes.
The secretary of state’s office said nearly all of the votes cast on the stolen ballots were stopped before they were counted. But three ballots were counted before election officials could pull them from the process because they passed signature verification. Those votes, the office confirmed, cannot be remedied or removed.
“Colorado’s elections are safe and secure,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold wrote in a statement. “This attempt at fraud was found and investigated quickly because of all the trailblazing processes and tools Colorado has in place like signature verification, ballot tracking, and the curing process.”
Several of the affected voters contacted the Mesa County clerk’s office after they received communications that their ballots required curing because of discrepancies with their signatures, the secretary of state’s news release said. One affected voter notified the Mesa County clerk after having received notification through the state’s tracking and notification system, BallotTrax, that the Mesa County clerk had received the ballot for processing. Voters can also track the status of their ballots at govotecolorado.gov.
The Mesa County district attorney is investigating, according to the secretary of state’s office. The district attorney’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment. The secretary of state’s office has not responded to a request looking to clarify which candidates the ballots were cast for.
Mesa County has been home to election conspiracy theories promoted in recent years, including by Republican former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who was recently convicted in a 2021 security breach of the county’s election system.
Colorado has a robust universal mail-in ballot system in which every registered voter is mailed a ballot. The state’s system was a model for many other states during the 2020 pandemic as states looked to boost accessibility.