By Jen Schumann | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
Three days. That’s all the time a Grand Junction resident has to challenge a candidate’s petition. But there’s one problem: the public doesn’t even know when the clock starts ticking.
The City of Grand Junction claims that residents can challenge election petitions, yet the necessary documents aren’t posted publicly and CORA requests take as long as the objection window itself.
Former Grand Junction City Councilman Kraig Andrews learned this firsthand after reading a Rocky Mountain Voice article that included redacted candidate filing petitions.
With his experience in local government and an eye for detail, Andrews noticed discrepancies that raised concerns about how the city reviews and certifies election petitions.
“I pulled them up on the computer and started downloading them, and I started seeing a ton of errors,” Andrews said.
Andrews found inconsistencies in how the city verified petitions. Some signatures missing required fields, such as county names, were accepted, while others were rejected.
“Running through both Kennedy’s and Hitzeroth’s petitions, I counted 16 different names that should have been disallowed because the county wasn’t listed,” Andrews said.
Notary errors also surfaced, raising questions about whether certain petitions should have been deemed valid.
“Four of the six affidavits were improperly notarized, with the notary inserting their own name instead of the circulator’s,” Andrews wrote in an email to city officials.
Andrews observed that some petitions lacked proper timestamps, making it unclear whether they were submitted on time.
“The timestamps are not on the top, where they normally should be. They are on the bottom right-hand corner, and on Hitzeroth’s petitions, only one petition has all the pages time stamped,” Andrews said.
The inconsistency teased Andrews’ curiosity, “Did [the clerk] truly receive it at 4 p.m. and stamp it at 4 p.m., or did she turn the time clock back?”
Given all the inaccuracies Andrews observed on the candidates’ nomination petitions, he decided to speak up and reach out to the city clerk. When Andrews formally protested the petition issues, the City dismissed his complaint, stating that he filed it too late.
“They said my [claim] was not timely. They’re saying I only have three days. Then they said that when they received it, it was in ‘apparent conformity’ with legal requirements,” Andrews said.
City officials also downplayed the importance of notary errors: “While your complaint correctly identifies a defect in the notarization process, it does not allege fraud or any disqualifying interest on the part of the notary,” stated the city clerk.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s notary guide explicitly warns against the exact mistakes found in Hitzeroth’s petition.
When a candidate announces they are running for office at the city level, there are filing requirements and deadlines. If candidates fail to follow the rules in the application process, the public may never know.
If a resident discovers that a candidate came up short in meeting filing requirements, they have a very short window of time to make an objection. The city follows Colorado’s municipal election laws, which require nomination objections by the public to be filed within three days of the candidate’s petition submission.
But there’s no system in place to notify the public when petitions are submitted, making it impossible for an average resident to make objections before the three day deadline.
Andrews contends, “You wouldn’t be able to challenge anything [inaccurate or misleading on a candidate petition] because you’d never know when they were filed — since [the City doesn’t] tell you,” Andrews said.
Currently, a Grand Junction resident would have to submit an open records request to discover which candidates filed their nomination petitions and whether they met the guidelines.
An open records request can take three days or longer to fulfill, meaning that by the time a citizen receives the petition to review, the objection deadline has already passed.
Lack of transparency in government erodes public trust, argues Andrews. “What’s the point of even having a process if nobody can check to make sure it’s being done right?”
The city clerk’s process shields candidates from scrutiny rather than allowing public oversight.
“There’s no public notice when a petition is submitted. There’s no way for residents to know when the three-day clock starts ticking. The city has the power to make this process more transparent, and they should,” Andrews asserts.
Transparency and accountability are top of mind for Andrews with the upcoming City Council elections.
“There’s a lot of things going on locally, whether it’s the white bollards that are popping up like weeds or the parking situation — killing businesses downtown. [We] have to be accountable in our elections and accountable in what we do. Because if a candidate wins who didn’t play by the rules when they filed, and all of this never comes out until after the fact, people will ask, ‘Why didn’t somebody speak up?’” Andrews said.
As a former city councilman, Andrews says officials must be held to higher standards, and residents are responsible for ensuring accountability.
After all, he says, “When you’re elected to office, you’re responsible for a whole lot more than yourself. You have to be accountable.”
When a process fails to deliver, or mistakes are made, Andrews says it’s incumbent on local government to acknowledge and address them. “Practice makes permanent. If you practice good habits, you will innately have good habits. But if you get used to bending rules and not following rules, it becomes easier to keep bending them later on,” Andrews said.
To fix this issue, Andrews believes the city must reform its petition review process.
Andrews argues that candidate petitions should be made public immediately upon filing to ensure transparency from the start. “The fact that these aren’t accessible right away means the public is left in the dark,” he said.
He also supports extending the objection window to seven days, explaining, “Three days is just not enough time when you don’t even know when the petitions were turned in.”
Properly timestamped petitions are also critical. Andrews asks, “Without clear timestamps, how can we trust that deadlines were followed?”
Without these reforms, he warns, the system will continue to protect bureaucracy over public accountability.
“The end goal is just to clean it up and make the process more user-friendly. The city has the power to make this process more transparent,” Andrews said.