El Paso Co. found a way to cut undeliverable ballots and clean voter rolls—Colorado leaders looked away

By Bob Cooper, COIFFE Director | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice

A $50,000 statewide solution was offered—and ignored—while Colorado processed more than 323,000 undeliverable ballots in a single year, costing over a million.

This story should get your attention and maybe even make you angry if you care about election integrity issues—or simply about wasting taxpayer dollars in every county in Colorado. Get this: El Paso County has been implementing a common-sense voter roll maintenance process, a true “Gold Standard” process, to reduce election costs and clean up the “dirty,” bloated voter rolls.

There is potential for this improved process to save thousands of dollars in election costs every year for every county in Colorado.

To help the state implement this, El Paso County has supported legislation drafted to codify this improvement statewide via HB26-1104, “Credit Agency Voter Address Verification.”

That legislation is based on a proven process piloted in April 2023. State legislators left it “lost in committee,” meaning nothing was done after a party-line vote.

It was also presented to the Colorado County Clerks Association (CCCA), and they did nothing. Likewise, the Secretary of State did nothing. You read that correctly; they did nothing. Nada. I am not an attorney, but maybe this is an example of maladministration, or at least incompetence. Read on and you decide.

Why the Current System Falls Short

Colorado already relies on two primary systems to maintain voter rolls:

• The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC)
• The U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database

These systems feed into the state’s voter database, known as SCORE, Colorado’s statewide voter registration database. Neither system is timely, comprehensive, or supportive of easy, error-free voter roll record changes by Elections Office personnel. Something clearly needed to be done.

In Colorado’s largest county, El Paso, County Clerk Steve Schleiker and his election staff implemented a major process improvement aimed at reducing undeliverable ballots while making voter rolls more accurate and up to date. The goal was simple: reduce the number of ballots mailed to outdated addresses. This improvement uses credit agency data to review voter rolls against more current residential or mailing addresses.

It is innovative and a “best practice” that every county could implement.

Some background: Mail ballot voting carries significant costs tied to undeliverable ballots—ballots sent to addresses where the voter no longer resides.

The U.S. Postal Service returns those ballots to the county as “undeliverable” and charges for each one.

Counties pay that cost, and then they must process and record these ballots, which results in the voter’s registration being flagged as “Inactive” with reason “Undeliverable Ballot.” These voters are not mailed ballots in the next election, and after two federal election cycles, the record is removed per federal law.

Each undeliverable ballot carries a cost to taxpayers in every election. In 2024 alone, Colorado had over 323,000 undeliverable ballots returned. I will come back to that number and why you should be angry.

In November 2022, El Paso County elected Steve Schleiker as county clerk, and he took office in January 2023. He encouraged transparency through public meetings, where one concern raised was the large number of undeliverable ballots and why the system produces so many. Counties are also required to store all undeliverable ballots for 25 months as official election records.

The El Paso team began analyzing options in early 2023. The primary issue is the accuracy of voter rolls. Colorado relies on ERIC and NCOA data to maintain those records. These sources feed updates into SCORE, and counties receive monthly reports to manage voter registration. When an address is flagged, the voter is marked “Inactive” until they respond to a mailed confirmation card. If there is no response, the record is removed.

Further research showed NCOA data does not provide comprehensive address updates. Younger voters often do not report address changes to USPS because they rely less on mail and conduct most transactions online.

El Paso explored alternatives and found research from the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the independent federal agency that develops guidance on election administration, showing credit agency data provides more current address information. Financial institutions require up-to-date addresses, making this data more reliable.

This approach dates back to a 2012 pilot in Orange County, California. Of 401,000 voter records, 74,000 were flagged for potential updates—18 percent of the total—based on Experian’s True Trace product.

You can read the August 2025 EAC report here.

The EAC is the only federal agency whose mission is dedicated exclusively to election administration—its research is conducted independently of any state or party and is used by election officials across the country.

In 2023, El Paso began using Experian’s True Trace to improve voter roll accuracy and reduce undeliverable ballots.

After three “runs” since April 2023, the results are striking:

• 91,084 address discrepancies identified
• 46,195 voter contacts initiated to confirm or update records
• Thousands of outdated registration addresses corrected or removed
• Estimated savings: $107,000

And that’s just one county.

This low-cost process can expand by sending confirmation cards to all non-matching addresses. That would allow the county to mark records “Inactive,” further reducing ballots mailed and undeliverable returns in each election. More cost reduction and more accurate voter rolls.

This is a best practice that should be adopted statewide.

The cost and time savings have the potential to be huge. Costs per ballot include printing the ballot packet, mailing it to the voter, return postage for undeliverable ballots, processing and recording those ballots, mailing confirmation cards, processing those confirmations, and storing each undeliverable ballot for 25 months.

A conservative estimate is $5 per undeliverable ballot.

Now this is why citizens in CO should be angry. To support HB26-1104, Experian offered the Secretary of State a $50,000 statewide solution to allow every county to cross-check voter addresses. That cost would break even at just 10,000 undeliverable ballots.

In 2024, Colorado had 323,216 undeliverable ballots, costing an estimated $1.6M. In El Paso alone, more than 4,700 registrations have been removed using this process. If implemented statewide, it would save at least $193,000, with potential to triple that using address confirmation cards.

Consider that the legislature dropped the proposed bill, the Secretary of State did nothing, and even worse, the CCCA did nothing.

Is this maladministration? I think so.

The Colorado Institute for Fair Elections (COIFFE) is a non-partisan volunteer group working to improve election integrity across Colorado. Its executive committee members include Bob Cooper, Marc Gitlitz, Bill Lehman, Mark Milliman, John Murino and John Graboski. They work with other volunteers to focus on cleaning up voter rolls and ensuring that only legal voters are participating in elections.

Related: Colorado says the system works. Others say it can’t be proven. Here’s why

Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.