Clear on camera, dismissed on paper

By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice

Inside the election case DA investigators said showed “clear violations”—and why the same office that prosecuted election fraud refused to touch it

A fire chief knows what a five-alarm emergency looks like. When something is burning, he responds. He doesn’t wait for someone else to handle it. That was the mindset Erik Holt carried in 2023 when the security cameras inside his fire station began showing behavior that made him stop, rewind the footage, and stare.

He believed he had uncovered an emergency worth reporting. He did not know that the alarm he pulled would be the only one the system refused to answer.

The fire chief who didn’t look away

Before Teller County voters ever heard his name, Holt was a fireman and a father. A career firefighter in Colorado Springs, an Iraq War veteran and a single dad raising two teenage daughters—Holt answered the call to serve as an interim fire chief in the Florissant Fire Protection District (FFPD) so he could be present for his kids and lead a rural department that needed stability.

“I was just a fire chief raising daughters, being a guy,” he told Yehuda Miller on The Truth Matters back in August.

He rebuilt the department quickly.

“I took a rural department from a handful of responders to sixty-two… with the best response times in the history of the department.” 

The May 2 election wasn’t a routine board shuffle. All five seats on the FFPD board were up at once, a rare full reset confirmed in the election filings. Five challengers ran together as a slate, aiming to take control in a single election. Voters weren’t weighing one opening or a minor shift. They were deciding who would run the whole district—its budget, leadership and direction—for the next four years.

Holt didn’t vote and wasn’t involved in any election duties. But the next morning—he started hearing from people who said they saw things that didn’t sit right with them.

That was when Holt approached the problem the way a fire chief would. He looked for the source of the smoke and worked outward from there.

He went to the source—he got the video-recordings.

What the videos showed

Holt reviewed over forty hours of surveillance video. Twice. He found and printed out the Colorado Rule 8 election-watcher statutes. He created a spreadsheet with columns including timestamps and the names involved—and rules he believed were violated. 

Afterwards he called the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office. He shared videos, the Rule 8 printout and the spreadsheet. And investigators logged all of it into evidence under case number 23DA097.

One clip showed a poll watcher seated at a table with a laptop.

“This lady’s sitting at the poll watcher table with a laptop… she violated like four election rules,” Holt said. 

Laptop left open at the watcher table, recording the voting area. Photo courtesy of Erik Holt.

Another showed voters tipping their hats or giving nods toward watchers, who then clicked handheld counters.

“Every time voters are coming through the poll watchers are clicking,” Holt pointed out. 

A citizen complaint mentioned a watcher outside asking on the phone whether a car pulling in had been paid. The video captured a watcher motioning those same voters inside moments later.

Watchers greeting voters inside the 100-foot zone. Photo courtesy of Erik Holt.

In the ballot-counting room, where both video and audio were recorded, an election judge’s comment unsettled Holt when he replayed it: “This election’s fixed.” A watcher clicked a counter in sync with the names being read.

What the DA investigator documented

In late May, Senior Investigator Clint Kramer sat down with the footage Holt had turned over and began reviewing what it showed.

In his first written report, he documented what he saw: “In the videos provided by Chief Holt, it is clear there were multiple incidents where the poll watchers were in violation of Rule 8 CCR.”

Kramer identified all six poll watchers, including Jordan Moon—and logged Holt’s video into evidence under Barcode 15278.

Investigator David Guest took further steps. 

The investigator went to the station and measured the distance between Moon and the entrance, finding he stood roughly thirteen feet from the wall and twenty-six feet from the doors, well inside Colorado’s 100-foot no-electioneering boundary. 

He enhanced the audio from the “Building 1 Front” camera and captured Moon saying “Schultz, Del Toro, Dunn… as long as you didn’t vote for Thompson or Snare.” 

Guest interviewed Moon. Moon said the transcript matched what was said on camera and conceded he was within 20 to 30 feet of the polling entrance. He described the watchers as organized, and said the DEO told them clickers were allowed, a claim not supported elsewhere in the file.

Among others, Guest also spoke with attorney Linda Glesne, who represented the FFPD Board during the election and told investigators she had received multiple complaints from voters and believed she had a duty to report them.

With the investigation underway, Holt sensed the consequences of speaking up closing in on him.

Guest’s report shows Holt told him the board was planning to fire him the next day in retaliation for reporting the election irregularities. Guest documented the call and told Holt he would record it in the case file.

Holt was fired on June 22, one day later. 

Read more about what the incoming board did leading up to Holt’s firing in our companion report.

The case the DA didn’t touch

By early July, the investigation had been built out through video analysis, audio isolation, distance measurements and interviews. At that point the case was routed to a new decision-maker. 

On July 5, Senior Investigator David Guest created a formal case file in the DA’s system and sent the full packet to Chief Deputy District Attorney Andy Vaughan for charging review.

On August 1, Vaughan issued his decision. He advised investigators that the evidence was “insufficient to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Jordan Moon committed the crime of Electioneering.” He instructed them to mark the case “No File” and close it.

Kramer’s earlier statement that the violations were “clear” did not advance past that review.

Two election cases, one DA, two very different outcomes

Recently the Fourth Judicial District Attorney’s Office publicly prosecuted a different election-related case. In El Paso County, clerks noticed irregularities in nomination petitions for a county commissioner race. Staff noticed signatures that didn’t add up, including some they said couldn’t have been collected during a snowstorm. 

The DA looked into it and charged a 29-year-old Ohio man with forging the petitions. KRDO later reported that he was convicted and sentenced.

One case involved handwriting inconsistencies on petitions.

The other involved on-camera, on-audio election-watcher behavior documented by DA investigators as “clear” violations of Rule 8.

Only one resulted in prosecution.

The five-alarm fire nobody wanted to fight

When the board terminated Holt, he had to explain to his daughters that he no longer had a job and did not know how he would keep their home.

“Holding that conversation with them was the hardest part… I didn’t know how I’d pay for the house.”

Holt had already spent $150,000 on legal fees, sold his home and eventually left Colorado to find work. His federal lawsuit argued he was fired for reporting evidence to law enforcement. 

A federal district judge ruled that his cooperation with prosecutors was part of his official duties, so his speech was not protected under the First Amendment.

Holt filed his appeal to the Tenth Circuit pro se, and Mountain States Legal Foundation later stepped in to represent him pro bono.

By the time Holt’s appeal was moving forward in the Tenth Circuit, the Tenth Circuit revived another Colorado whistleblower case involving the Green Mountain Water and Sanitation District. In the Timmins v. Plotkin ruling, the court held that public employees retain First Amendment protections when they speak to outside parties in ways not “ordinarily within the scope” of their job duties.

For Holt, whose job description as fire chief never included investigating elections or delivering evidence to prosecutors—the distinction may prove significant.

The moment Holt decided not to quit

Many people are tired of hearing about elections. The subject brings frustration, fatigue—or skepticism. Holt’s case is different. It’s not about theories or speculation. It’s not about machines or algorithms. 

It’s about what unfolded at a rural fire station over one election day in 2023. It’s about a man who heard complaints, reviewed the video, reported it—and lost everything for doing so.

At one point he was living in a trailer in his stepdad’s backyard. Then he moved out of state, got a job and said, “I felt like, alright, we’re gonna rebuild.”

Holt’s resolve didn’t come from the courtroom or the investigation. It came from a moment of clarity about what his daughters needed to see from him.

“I was eating dinner with my girlfriend and my two daughters at the table… girls chatter like you wouldn’t believe… but I was looking at them and the room was silent. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, and I was just thinking these girls will never see me quit something that I feel so firmly about.” 

“That’s literally the moment that I started reading case law and started digging into whether I could do this on my own, whether I was even allowed to. And I filed. Everything since that point has been out of that fatherly instinct that my kids would never see me quit.” 

The Tenth Circuit will decide whether Holt’s report to prosecutors was protected speech. The question for Colorado is why the DA’s office responded to two election cases so differently. The question for the public is why evidence investigators described as “clear” never made it past a single review.

Holt did what fire chiefs do. He saw smoke, pulled the alarm and expected help to arrive. What happened instead is why this story is not going away.

For updates on Holt’s case, he posts information on his Facebook page at facebook.com/justiceforholt.