By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
Arapahoe County quietly replaced its 2020 general election cast vote record (CVR) in early 2025 – years after the election was certified. The change came without public notice, audit, or oversight. The reason? A Yale professor raised concerns about a strange pattern in the data.
That pattern, according to a growing number of analysts and lawmakers, was more than just strange. It was statistically impossible.
“This is like flipping a coin 3,500 times and getting heads every time,” said Dr. Walter Daugherity, a Harvard-trained computer scientist who presented forensic findings at a press conference held Tuesday on the west steps of the Colorado Capitol. RMV covered the lead-up to the event in a story titled Analyst to reveal altered Arapahoe 2020 CVR at Tuesday Capitol press conference.
The event began under unusual circumstances – just as the first speaker took the mic, a fire alarm was triggered. “Strangely, it went off right at 2:30,” Rep. Ken DeGraaf (HD22) said. “Security said it wasn’t a drill.”
Daugherity’s May 25 report shows that the original CVR released by Arapahoe County in 2022 revealed a bizarre level of uniformity between Trump and Biden voters on a down-ballot issue – Proposition B, which repealed the Gallagher Amendment.
“You would expect far more than 50% of Republicans to vote no,” Daugherity explained. “Instead, it always stays below 50%. This can’t happen in a real election.”
Daugherity, whose curriculum vitae includes work with the Department of Defense, NASA, and the Texas Attorney General’s Office, called the original CVR “irrefutable evidence of manipulation.” Full video of the press conference, along with related exhibits, Dr. Daugherity’s full report, and filings submitted by Rep. DeGraaf, are linked throughout this article and available for review.
When were they lying?
In February 2025, Arapahoe County posted a new CVR online, labeling it “redacted.” But a line-by-line comparison revealed something else: nearly every ballot had changed. According to Daugherity, 99.99% of ballots were altered between the 2022 and 2025 versions, impacting over one million individual vote entries.
Daugherity said that on average, 45 selections per ballot were altered. “That means the changes weren’t cosmetic – they rewrote the voting record from top to bottom,” he explained.
And yet the overall election results stayed the same.
DeGraaf, the only current Colorado lawmaker present at the press conference, questioned the discrepancy.
“You have two spreadsheets. Over a million bubbles were changed between them, but they all come out with the same end results,” DeGraaf said. “That means someone reallocated the data – not to change the winner, but to hide the pattern.”
“Both of them are wrong. One of them could be right – but both can’t be. So you have to ask: when were they lying?” DeGraaf added.
The silent overwrite
The changes were made based on feedback from Yale Assistant Professor Shiro Kuriwaki, who reportedly contacted the county in late 2024 after discovering the unnatural trend. Rather than initiate an audit or escalate the issue to the Secretary of State or vendor (Dominion), county officials simply replaced the original file with a revised one.
“There is a federal law that says you have to maintain a permanent audit record with a manual audit capability,” Daugherity warned. “That record must link to an actual ballot. You don’t get to change it just because a professor thinks it looks weird.”
Attorney John Case, who co-hosted the press conference, asked, “Is it the clerk’s sworn duty to preserve records or to alter them?” Dr. Walter Daugherity answered, “Think about the title: County Clerk and Recorder. If a recorder doesn’t preserve records without altering them, they’re not much of a recorder, are they?”
Attorney John Case wasn’t the only one raising legal concerns. Ed Solomon, who is a party to ongoing litigation in Nevada involving election data anomalies, testified during the Arapahoe County Commissioners meeting the same morning as the Capitol press conference.
“Article Four, Section Four of the United States Constitution… Any state whose elections are not free nor fair cannot be republican in form. That’s line one in our court case,” Solomon said.
He described the 2025 CVR overwrite as confirming a pattern of engineered outcomes. “Arapahoe County has done the most amazing thing in American history. They proved our case… You proved that lockstep motion cannot occur naturally. Free and fair elections do not come with engineered geometrical symmetry.”
Solomon warned that the overwrite potentially constituted evidence tampering. “Why was neither the Nevada Court, Judge Reynolds, the plaintiff Andy Thompson, or I notified?” he asked. “You have tampered with evidence across state lines. The FBI and the DOJ are already making official inquiries on this.”
No state officials, including the Secretary of State or Attorney General, have publicly commented on the overwrite. During the May 27 meeting, an Arapahoe County commissioner stated the board had previously addressed related concerns but did not respond directly to the allegations raised. The Secretary of State’s Office has not launched an investigation.
The starkest contrast may be found in how state institutions responded to similar concerns from another county.
When Tina Peters preserved data, she was raided. When Arapahoe changed data, no one noticed.
Tina Peters, the former Mesa County Clerk, authorized a forensic image of Dominion’s voting system before a software update in 2021. That decision resulted in a criminal investigation, a media firestorm and a high-profile trial. Peters is now serving a prison sentence in Colorado.
Meanwhile, Arapahoe County altered 354,000 ballot records behind closed doors and labeled it redaction. No subpoenas. No press conferences. No arrests.
“Thick as thieves comes to mind,” DeGraaf said. “The state should have supported Tina Peters’ effort to preserve records. Instead, they prosecuted her while quietly allowing counties like Arapahoe to rewrite history.”
What the state knew—and what it deleted
DeGraaf provided Rocky Mountain Voice with documents he says confirm the state knowingly allows for the deletion of digital records, including audit logs and metadata. In a 2025 final agency order, the Secretary of State’s Office dismissed his complaint, claiming that such files are not legally defined as election records.
But in DeGraaf’s formal rebuttal, he highlights a conflict.
“Your assertion that ‘the only records election officials must maintain are those found in election-specific databases’ seems to differ from the actual Voting System Standards,” DeGraaf wrote. “It is essential in establishing public trust that such files be preserved as the law requires.”
He cites the 2002 Voting System Standards, which state:
“Election audit trails provide the supporting documentation for verifying the correctness of reported election results… and are essential for public confidence… and evidence in the event of criminal or civil litigation.”
A 2022 declaration by digital forensics expert Douglas Gould, co-submitted in an earlier court case, warned that the same Dominion system “automatically deletes logs critical for forensic audits,” making it “impossible to detect election crimes or civil rights violations.”
DeGraaf countered that the state’s reasoning hinges on wordplay. “Substantially compliant is not compliant,” he wrote. “There is no list of waivers or exemptions from the 2002 Voting System Standards.”
Echoes from Mesa County
Daugherity also co-authored Mesa County Report #3 – a forensic audit of Dominion’s systems conducted using the same type of pre-update image that Peters preserved. That report showed unauthorized databases and deletion of election logs in violation of state and federal record retention laws.
“In both Mesa and Arapahoe, the story is the same,” he said. “The official record was manipulated. The difference is who gets punished for pointing it out.”
A call for accountability—and transparency
Daugherity, Case, DeGraaf, Solomon and others are now calling for a full investigation into the altered CVR – and a statewide legal hold on election records.
DeGraaf also called for an immediate legal hold on all election system logs, emails, and administrative documents. “Nothing should be destroyed. Everything should be on legal hold,” he urged.
“This isn’t just about Arapahoe,” said former State Sen. Kevin Lundberg, who helped moderate the Capitol event. “It’s about the integrity of Colorado’s entire election system.”