Cleaning the rolls, cutting the cost: How Las Animas County found a better way

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

The Clerk and Election team in Las Animas County also adopted a “best practice” to improve Colorado Elections while reducing costs. We now have our largest Colorado county (El Paso County) and a medium-sized county (Las Animas) using a commercial credit agency to flag registered voters who no longer reside at the address in SCORE. SCORE is the Statewide Colorado Voter Registration and Elections system.       

These two counties demonstrate leadership by pursuing real “Gold Standard” election operations. 

Every Colorado voter should demand other counties implement this best practice because it significantly reduces costs associated with undeliverable ballots while at the same time reduces the opportunity for election crime. The inaccurate addresses in SCORE cause over 300,000 ballots to be mailed out and fail to be delivered. There is no chain of custody on those ballots. The United States Postal Service has no tracking for them. 

Thousands could be stolen and no one would know. Only a portion of those ballots are returned to the County Clerk’s office.

For additional context, please refer to the Rock Mountain Voice (RMV) article about El Paso County, published on April 6th. El Paso, Colorado’s largest county, mailed out just under 1.4M ballots in 2024 for 3 elections. Las Animas mailed out just over 32,000.      

Both counties confirm huge benefits in auditing addresses stored in the voter database (SCORE) using Experian credit reporting data.      

As reported in the previous RMV article, use of credit agencies is a proven method to make voter rolls more accurate.           

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) acknowledges the use of address data from credit agency reports does improve accuracy of the voter records. Simple reason for this is that all who have bank accounts and credit cards are much more inclined to update their address records for financial accounts than their voter registrations.           

The research on this dates back to the first pilot, done in 2012 in Orange County, CA with incredible results. Out of 401,000 voter records, 74,000 were flagged as possibly having undergone changes. That represents 18 percent of the voter records not being current, based on Experian’s True Trace list maintenance product.      

You can read more about this pilot in the August 2025 EAC report. 

Las Animas County Clerk Karrie Apple and her election staff in 2023 decided to innovate also. Like El Paso Co., they engaged with Experian to help audit addresses stored in the county’s Voter Roll registration records.      

As background, Las Animas has just over 11,500 registered voters with close to 10,400 as active voters. Clerk Apple took office in January 2023. Her election team reviewed issues with past elections that included duplicate ballots, difficulty resolving rural address changes, and even undeliverable ballots that were missing.       

What leaders do is improve processes and solve problems. What leaders do is look for “best practices” and they compare notes with their peers and then act. 

So, in July of 2024 Las Animas started using Experian’s product to review accuracy of voter addresses regarding the 10,400 active registrations. Look at the results:

The county’s audit found 1,710 registrations with address discrepancies. That is almost 17 percent of the active registration addresses.       

Note that El Paso County found 10.8 percent discrepancies.      

They also found the details on why. 550 were moves within the county, 235 moved to another CO county, 353 moved out of the state, 177 were duplicate records. And get this, 77 were deceased. None of these changes were recorded in SCORE and were not included in National Change of Address (NCOA) data supplied by the U.S. Postal Service.      

Just contemplate these findings. In 2023 the county had costs from 900 undeliverable ballots. The portion returned was stored for over 2 years. In 2024, using the Experian product for the General Election, total undeliverable ballots dropped to 145. A 6-fold drop. Huge cost saving.      

There is a process the county implemented that El Paso did not yet do but will do. The Clerk’s elections team sent out confirmation cards to verify the voter was not at the address. This allowed the county to mark a registration “Inactive”.      

This rule makes sure that ballots are only mailed to voters who actually live at the listed address.       

This county reduced election costs by $14,290. To put this into perspective, the saving costs for the entire state could be over $1M every year.        

For Denver county alone, there is cost saving potential of $190,000, not to mention having more accurate voter rolls. 

But here is even more proof this is a process that should be implemented in every county. Las Animas wanted to verify using credit agency address data makes a difference. They did not use the process in 2025. Look at the results and you decide. 

2023:   900 undeliverable ballots – Experian not used.

2024:   145 undeliverable ballots – Experian used to audit SCORE.

2025:   463 undeliverable ballots – Experian not used.

Excellent job by the Las Animas County Clerk and Elections team!

This should make every voter angry that other counties are not trying this best practice.      

As our previous article mentioned,  the legislature blocked making this a new audit process, the Colorado County Clerk’s Association (CCCA) ignored this suggestion and worse the Secretary of state did nothing on this and even rejected a unique offer from Experian to pilot the process.       

Voters should be outraged when they see most election officials, clerks and the Secretary of State do nothing to improve the accuracy of SCORE and waste up to $1M a year on election costs. 

Las Animas County also demonstrates that using a credit agency delivers significant cost savings while reducing undeliverable ballots and strengthening the accuracy of voter rolls.     

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.