By Mike O’Donnell | Guest Commentary, Rocky Mountain Voice
Questions about who belongs on Colorado's voter rolls extend beyond duplicate registrations. In Part 6, Mike O'Donnell examines how citizenship verification works, why he believes outside review is limited and how one Aurora apartment address became the most unusual pattern he encountered while reviewing Colorado's public voter roll.
Noncitizen Registrants
The very first question on the Colorado Voter Registration Form asks whether an application is a U.S. citizen or not.
The answer to this first question is required, although if someone “forgets” to answer it, then because they also sign the declaration at the bottom of page 1, they are nonetheless presumed to be a U.S. citizen.
An AI search initially identified one Colorado case involving false citizenship information on a voter registration application. In 2005, Ajmal Shah was prosecuted federally after authorities said he attempted to register to vote by providing false information regarding U.S. citizenship. Mr. Shah was fined $200 and sentenced to time served plus supervised release.
Further research identified a second Colorado case. In 2015, Vitaliy B. Grabchenko pleaded guilty in Arapahoe County to misdemeanor procuring false registration and received a two-year deferred sentence, two years of supervised probation and 48 hours of community service. Those are the only two Colorado cases I identified involving noncitizens and false voter registration.
Apparently no one ever attempts to pull the wool over the Secretary of State’s eyes when it comes to falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen.
According to the Migration Policy Institute’s Data Hub, Colorado is home to an estimated 230,000 unauthorized immigrants. This population primarily consists of individuals from Mexico and Central America, with many living here for more than a decade.
There are also an estimated 110,000 lawful permanent residents / Green Card holders in Colorado and according to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, 14,340 new Green Cards were issued in Colorado in 2023 (latest data year) and 11,411 Green Card holders became U.S. citizens.
There is no real way for a citizen auditor like myself to check whether an active status registrant is a U.S. citizen or not. Occasionally a news report might mention the name of an illegal alien detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) in Colorado, which can be compared against names on the public Colorado voter roll, although as a general rule, names of ICE detainees aren’t publicly published due to privacy laws.
The Department of Justice could check for illegal alien registrants on the Colorado voter roll and is currently suing the Secretary of State to do just that. The Secretary of State had no concerns about sharing confidential voter roll information with ERIC but continues to refuse to share it with the Department of Justice.
Without access to confidential immigration records, there is little that an outside researcher can independently verify about citizenship. But the public voter roll itself can still reveal unusual patterns worth asking questions about. One address in Aurora stood out more than any other.
The Curious Case of 1090 S Parker Road, Apartment A503
In many respects, the public Colorado voter roll is a window into the world of everyday Coloradans.
When you sort registrants by addresses, patterns emerge that make it easier to identify and catch potential issues. One county clerk regularly sorts her voter roll by addresses to look for unusual concentrations of registrants or addresses where there are two groups of registrants with different last names, a strong indication that one family has moved out and another moved in.
I doubt that the Colorado Secretary of State has ever looked at the Colorado voter roll this way but if she had, she may have watched the story of apartment A503, 1090 S. Parker Road, unfold in real time, and communicate what she found with the state attorney general’s office, before it was too late.
That apartment complex on Parker Road contains one and two bedroom apartments and A503 appears to be a one bedroom unit. According to the public Colorado voter roll, there are no active status registrants attached to that address presently, only inactive status registrants, all with Middle Eastern names. But there were, or may have been, 104 men and (mostly) women living in that apartment between 2021 and 2023 and the voter roll tells that story.
Originally the unit was occupied by a male born in 1971. Based on his registration date, he moved there in 2016. In October and November of 2021, four female registrants apparently moved into the unit with him. All four had as a ballot mailing address, a suite number 272 at an address in Aurora that interestingly enough housed a plethora of different types of businesses; a security firm; insurance agency; transportation company; crash investigator; search engine optimization firm; mental health and substance use disorder group; academic evaluations company; online counseling firm, and, tellingly, the secondary practice address of a local health care provider.
Twelve more registrants apparently joined the original occupant and his four other associates in unit A503 on Parker Road in 2022; three males and nine females. Two of the females had the same suite 275 Aurora mailing address as the four that allegedly moved in the previous year.
Things began to get really crowded in 2023 when 94 new registrants, thirteen males and eighty-one females apparently arrived.
The year started off slowly with only eight new registrants arriving that first half of the year although between July and the end of October, eighty-two new registrants arrived, in many cases in groups of four, five or six on the same day, and mostly during October.
No one noticed. Especially the Secretary of State, who should have.
As of today, all 104 original registrants have an inactive status on the public Colorado voter roll. Most had the ballots mailed to them for the state’s November 2023 election returned undeliverable through the U.S. Postal Service and the original occupant, potentially the only real person to ever live in that unit, had his ballot returned undeliverable effective November 2025.
Voter history files show that only the original occupant ever voted in Colorado.
It is highly unlikely that the other 103 registrants, even if they ever existed, lived there. One possible explanation is that those names were used in a Medicare/Medicaid scam. But because of the way Colorado’s voter roll works, 101 of them will remain on the Colorado voter roll with an inactive status until after the 2026 federal election and the remaining 3 until after the 2028 federal election.
If there had simply been any basic checks in place at the front end of Colorado’s voter registration process, perhaps the system flagging an impossible number of new additions to one residential address, those registrants may never have been added to the voter roll. But no, nothing like that under the current Colorado Secretary of State.
Mike O’Donnell is a small business advocate, nonprofit executive and economic development leader based in Kirk, Colorado. He currently serves as Executive Director of Prairie Rose Development Corp., a mission-driven lender supporting underserved entrepreneurs across the state.
Editor’s note: This is Part 6 of a seven-part guest commentary series examining Colorado’s voter registration system and voter roll through the author’s review of publicly available records and other cited sources. Read Part 1: Getting on is the easy part, Part 2: Getting off isn’t so easy, Part 3: Where the ballots go, Part 4: Following the ballot and Part 5: When one registration becomes two. Coming next: Part 7, the concluding installment, where Mike O’Donnell shares additional unusual findings uncovered during his review of Colorado’s voter roll before offering his final conclusions. Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Rocky Mountain Voice, but we support the constitutional right of authors to express those opinions.