Lengthy analysis and research into one county’s 2022 election results has brought up some significant concerns, Heidi Ganahl, the Republican candidate for governor in 2022, announced Thursday in a press conference.
“I’m concerned that Colorado’s elections are not the gold standard as proclaimed,” Ganahl said, “but a bit of fool’s gold.”
She is the founder and president of Rocky Mountain Voice, and a noted advocate for free and fair elections.
“Verifying the integrity of election systems is not the exclusive role of law enforcement, but the right and duty of the citizens, and the delegated responsibility of our legislature and our election officials,” Ganahl said. “It’s important the citizens of Colorado hear what I’ve learned.”
Her findings have led her to potentially litigate on behalf of Coloradans against the secretary of state, although Ganahl indicates she would seek other remedies.
Ganahl points to outcomes in Douglas County during the 2022 election, during which her name appeared on the ballot.
Kurt Huffman, who campaigned to become the Colorado House District 43 representative of Highlands Ranch, as an incumbent, lost despite the district being a plus-10 Republican area of Douglas County.
“Kurt ran a good race, and the final numbers simply just didn’t make sense, as every Republican around him won with large margins,” Ganahl said.
She also noted results of her own race in Douglas County, where she lives and works.
“They seemed off as well, and very different from the other Republicans running,” Ganahl said.
They asked for a recount in the county, seeking to gain insight into perceived discrepancies. Ganahl recalls that recount including Secretary of State Jena Griswold convincing Douglas County’s Republican clerk and recorder not to allow the canvass board to lead the recount, which is their statuary responsibility. The recount, instead, was conducted entirely by county election employees, Ganahl added.
The “adjudication-only recount” as later described by the canvass board did not meet statutory requirements for a complete recount as outlined in Colorado election law, Ganahl complains.
Among their complaints, Ganahl reports election judges did not manually review the paper ballots, the process relied entirely upon the ClearVote machine count without a comparison of machine and manual counts, canvass board members were largely uninvolved and no legal counsel was allowed to be present to guide them.
“Observers pointed out that the process violated Colorado statutes, including the requirement for a complete recount, and that election officials, including the secretary of state, induced violations of state election laws,” Ganahl said. “Rules, edicts, and orders from the secretary of state violating and undermining our Constitution and statutes are a concerning pattern of conduct.”
“After this unserious response to our request, we requested access to the ballots to do our own review through the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) process, and the clerk’s office came back with a $212,000 invoice to dissuade us, a common practice here in Colorado,” Ganahl said.
She contacted an election attorney and, after substantial time and financial investments, was eventually able to examine the paper ballots in April 2024.
“We brought in our own scanning equipment and under the county’s supervision scanned over 85,000 of the 193,000 paper ballots for later examination of ballot images,” Ganahl said.
That process included working with various experts to analyze various aspects of the election, with a focus on Douglas County, Ganahl says.
“Almost two years later, what we’ve found is troubling,” Ganahl said. “We can confirm through purchase order records and written confirmation from the Douglas County clerk’s office that there are indeed wireless networking cards installed in their voting system computers that could be used to expose the voting system to unauthorized remote access.”
The wireless networking cards serve no purpose in a voting system in Colorado, yet were “deliberately included in the voting system configuration by the vendor and certified by the secretary of state,” Ganahl said.
“We have to ask ourselves now whether our public officials responsible for the security and integrity of our voting systems are intentionally allowing these vulnerabilities or are merely not competent to protect against them,” Ganahl added.
She also spoke of misleading statements from some officials.
“The voting system is secured from tampering through multiple safeguards,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in December 2020 to the Legislative Audit Committee in a hearing on election integrity. “Voting systems are never connected to and cannot be accessed through the Internet because Wi-Fi and bluetooth capability are stripped from the unit before use and all other connective technology is disabled by the Trusted Build.”
In Jefferson County, Sarah McAfee, a spokesperson for the Jefferson County clerk’s office, also claimed no voting machine in the state had every been connected to the Internet.
“In larger counties that have multiple vote counting machines, these machines may be networked together, but it is a closed network, not accessible from outside the room the equipment is housed in,” McAfee said.
Ganahl counters: “There are other secure methods to transmit election results to the secretary of state’s office without connecting any Election Management System to the Internet. Other counties, such as Boulder, use secure and sterilized USB drives to transfer election results to other computers where they can validate and upload results to the state.”
There are instances she cites in El Paso and Mesa County, where further claims of machines not being connected to the Internet have been made, including by former Secretary of State Wayne Williams.
“Our public officials were either naive or lying to us,” Ganahl said. “Regardless, any wireless remote access hardware/software should be removed from all voting equipment immediately to restore some measure of justified trust and confidence in our upcoming election.”
She is calling upon the General Assembly to require and confirm removal of wireless remote access hardware/software or to decertify the voting systems which incorporate it.
“There is a reason bank vaults don’t have back doors,” Ganahl said. “If someone installs a back door in your bank vault, you need to start questioning that person’s motives and integrity.”
Another issue that came to light in the analysis was with the post office. Through the CORA process, there was no chain of custody Ganahl or her attorneys, or the county clerk, could identify between county clerk offices and the USPS for thousands of undeliverable ballots.
“Undeliverable ballots are a vital election record in every election,” Ganahl said. “States with mail-in voting systems, like Colorado, mail out millions of ballots at the start of an election.”
“It is extremely important that all undeliverable ballots are tracked with a chain of custody demonstrating the quantity the USPS collected matches the quantity the counties record as undeliverable,” she continued.
She notes counties typically produce a “Mail Ballot Reconciliation Report” that records every undeliverable ballot processed by the county during the election. The USPS charges each county a return fee for every undeliverable ballot. Analysis of those USPS invoices can determine the quantity of undeliverable ballots the USPS charged to each county.
But, the organization Colorado Institute for Fair Elections met with four counties, learning counties do not normally compare USPS invoices against returned undeliverable ballots, Ganahl said.
The CORA information found that of 11 of Colorado’s largest counties, only 2 confirmed records of undeliverable ballots closely matching quantities on USPS invoices billed to their respective county.
After more than 25 CORA requests among 11 counties, Bob Cooper, with Colorado Institute for Fair Elections, learned the following about the 2022 General Election:
- In 9 counties, the invoice records are significantly different than the official undeliverable count.
- In the 11 counties, more than 18,000 undeliverable ballots have no matching USPS invoice record.
- In 3 counties, more than 12,000 undeliverable ballots were invoiced, but the county has no record of receiving them. There are 3,300 in Douglas County alone that are unaccounted.
“So what happened to the thousands of USPS-designated undeliverable ballots that are missing and what is the full total number of government-mailed ballots which are not reaching the purported voters for each ballot, and which are unaccounted for?,” Ganahl asked.
“Based on what we have discovered in our analysis, we are very concerned that drop boxes are ripe for foul play with inadequate monitoring,” Ganahl said. “Poor quality video cameras are being used at ballot drop boxes that are often aimed in a way that doesn’t allow for capturing who is dropping off a ballot or ballots or how many. They are useless to confirm excessive ballot harvesting, which is any quantity greater than 10 ballots per registered voter, not meeting minimal standards of Rule 7. Requests to upgrade these cameras in counties have generally been ignored or denied stating that the current cameras are adequate.”
Public officials who assert ballot drop boxes are secure because they have video monitoring have not made an effort to review the 200,000 plus hours of ballot dropbox video per election, she notes.
“In other words, this ‘safeguard’ is no safeguard at all – it’s a seatbelt that’s been installed, improperly, and isn’t being used at all,” Ganahl said. “If our election officials are going to assert that the dropbox video is a safeguard, then our county commissioners and legislature should require that all dropbox video is reviewed every election to ensure no violations of law or citizens’ rights have taken place.”
Citizens who have attempted to overcome public officials abdication of duty in regard to the video have found requesting copies of the video cumbersome, sometimes expensive, and frequently delayed until long after the elections, Ganahl added.
“Our officials have been patting us on the head, telling us everything is fine; everything is not fine, and how would they even know?,” Ganahl asked.
She is calling for drop boxes to be monitored by Colorado citizens on and before Election Day, Nov. 5.
“We have the volunteers and infrastructure to organize and deploy this effort now that we have received clarification from the Secretary of State’s office as of two hours a go that cumbersome rules that seemingly applied to public observers won’t. We’ll be making sure that is the case, and ready to take legal action if their first amendment rights to observe are infringed.” Ganahl said.
She adds that since her campaign in 2022, she’s stayed committed to defending Colorado citizen’s freedoms and rights. She suggests the following as actions that could be taken in the next 40-plus days to do so.
- Demand election officials remove all remote access capabilities, both hardware and software, from voting equipment immediately.
- Advise canvassing board members of their responsibility and authority to review any and all records, including registration, voting history, signature records, signature verification and voting machine audit trail, before they swear under oath that they believe election results to be true and accurate.
- Insist postmasters and county clerks carefully account for undeliverable ballots and expect an audit on those reports, as well as all informed visibility, mail tracking and reporting records for ballots.
- Monitor actions by the secretary of state and attorney general which threaten and attempt to suppress the exercise of First Amendment rights by our citizens, to monitor ballot dropboxes, an action which our government should already be undertaking, and without which it is derelict in its duty to ensure the purity of our elections.
- And finally, if our election officials are going to assert that the dropbox video is a safeguard, then our county commissioners and legislature should require that all dropbox video is reviewed every election to ensure no violations of law or citizens’ rights have taken place.
“I am proud of the work we’ve done and believe we have uncovered critical information which could help make our elections trustworthy, and a real Gold Standard, instead of the fool’s gold our government has been trading us for our birthright,” Ganahl said.
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