By Jen Schumann | Rocky Mountain Voice
The ballot simply shows up weeks before Election Day.
Some ballots are filled out the day they arrive. Others sit untouched until the weekend. Too many, most will argue, end up ignored. Eventually, a lot are mailed, taken to a drop box or walked into a polling center.
It’s the only system younger voters have ever known.
The Election Integrity Network would prefer something closer to the system Colorado left behind.
In May, they released a 116-page handbook outlining what it believes election laws should look like across the country.
Before ballots filled the mailbox
EIN founder Cleta Mitchell sees Colorado’s pre-2013 election system as a blueprint rather than a relic.
“Before 2013–14, Colorado used a precinct-based, in-person voting system, closed voter registration 29 days before Election Day, and required 30 days of residency in a precinct,” Mitchell wrote to RMV.
That changed in 2013 when Hickenlooper signed the Voter Access and Modernized Elections Act, a law that reshaped how Coloradans vote.
To Mitchell, the handbook is not asking Colorado to invent something new. It is pointing back to a system she believes the state already had.
“Aside from the move to no-excuse absentee voting, that earlier Colorado system closely resembles the model outlined in the Model Election Laws Handbook. It allows observers to monitor the process, enables election officials to know the number of eligible voters in each precinct in advance, supports verification of voter eligibility at the state, county, and precinct levels, and makes it possible to reconcile the number of voters with the number of ballots issued.”
Citizenship first
Ask Mitchell where election integrity starts and she doesn’t talk about audits or voting machines.
“The first principle of the U.S. Citizens Election Bill of Rights, ‘Only U.S. Citizens Participate in U.S. Elections, in Any Manner,’ stands as the most foundational,” she wrote to RMV.
“Without ensuring that only eligible U.S. citizens vote, the other protections (such as voter ID, secure paper ballots, timely results, and accurate voter rolls) lose much of their effectiveness,” she added.
The federal government is currently suing Colorado over access to voter-registration data. Griswold has called the federal effort “undemocratic, unconstitutional and dangerous.”
Why EIN says Colorado should change course
On June 2, Griswold praised a newly signed election bill, celebrating how “we will send out ballots and open drop boxes earlier.”
For Mitchell, those changes move Colorado farther from the type of election system outlined in the handbook.
She criticized mail-ballot voting, drop boxes and ballot-curing procedures, arguing that too much of the process occurs outside public view.
A system under scrutiny: Colorado’s election system faces clash over how it’s verified
Why did nearly 500,000 Colorado voter records change after elections were certified?
Trust, but verify
Mitchell’s argument about citizenship is only the starting point.
In a May article for The Federalist, EIN President Sharon Bemis wrote that election problems cannot be fixed with a single reform because voter registration, voter-roll maintenance, ballot accountability and certification all work together.
“Reversing decades of damage—driven by activism that prioritized access over integrity—requires more than a single remedy,” Bemis wrote.
Bemis says the warning signs can already be found in voter rolls across the country: duplicate registrations, deceased voters and registrations tied to addresses that raise questions.
North Carolina election officials recently found roughly 34,000 deceased individuals still listed on the state’s voter rolls.
A separate review in California identified nearly 95,000 deceased registrants, more than 57,000 apparent interstate duplicates and thousands of records with questionable birthdates.
“These exact problems—dead registrants and duplicate registrations—are what Principle IV of the Handbook directly targets with model laws requiring rigorous, recurring voter-roll maintenance using DMV, SSA, and federal databases,” Bemis stated to RMV.
Let citizens help find the problems
The handbook assumes some of the best information about voter rolls may come from outside government.
Not every voter-roll problem is discovered by a database.
Sometimes it comes from citizens who notice when a deceased relative is still registered, when duplicate records appear or when a voter registration is tied to an address that raises questions.
To maintain voter rolls, EIN outlines a process where “election offices must accept documentation of bad registrations from citizens” and “act on citizen challenges” rather than ignore them.
How do you know the count is right?
Voter rolls are only part of the story.
Verifying election results is another.
Once ballots are cast and counted, EIN leaders say the same question still remains:
How does the public know the outcome is accurate?
Ask Colorado election officials why they trust the system and risk-limiting audits are likely to come up quickly. The audits compare paper ballots to electronic vote records and are intended to confirm the reported outcome reflects the ballots cast.
Policy Director Kathy Harms argues the issue is larger than whether audits occur at all.
“In the past several years, there has been a move by the election-litigation industrial complex to remove from the process all vestiges of confirmation of accuracy,” Harms wrote to RMV.
“The process often results in a simple rescan of the same ballots through the same scanners and confirms nothing insofar as ensuring that the scanners or voting machines were properly programmed or operating in the first place.”
Harms says certification should not be the point where election officials stop asking questions. That process begins at the precinct level, where voter totals, ballots issued and ballots counted can be reconciled and any discrepancies addressed.
She said it’s “similar to balancing one’s checkbook.”
“The numbers should match and if they don’t, the results need to be reviewed to find the discrepancy.”
Results should be traceable at each step of the process, and any differences should be explained before certification happens.
“Once the numbers are reconciled at the precinct, the results can be transmitted—and the results similarly reconciled at each level.”
The only secret should be your vote
Harms said election transparency should extend beyond what many states currently allow.
“We believe that the only secret in the election process should be who someone voted for.”
She argued voter rolls should generally remain available for public review, with only limited categories of personal information protected.
A question of trust
EIN leaders say the handbook was not written in a vacuum.
Bemis said it was developed as an implementation guide for the U.S. Citizens Elections Bill of Rights, a document the organization released earlier.
EIN cites polling showing strong support for several election-security measures included in its Election Bill of Rights.
RMV submitted questions to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office about the handbook and its proposed changes to Colorado elections. RMV will update this story if a response is received.
Griswold reminded voters about trust this week in a notice about ballots going out for the primary election.
“Election disinformation continues to be used to undermine our democracy and divide our nation. Coloradans should consult trusted sources, including GoVoteColorado.gov and their County Clerk’s Office, to learn more about elections in Colorado,” Griswold said in a press release.
Griswold’s office has spent years defending Colorado’s election system as secure and accessible.
The disagreement isn’t over whether elections should be trusted. It’s over how that trust is earned.
Asked what Colorado voters would gain if the handbook’s recommendations were adopted, Bemis returned to a theme that appears throughout the document.
“The voters of Colorado should be able to trust that an election accurately reflects their collective will and that the outcome is not one that has been predetermined by an elite political class able to manipulate the results through a flawed and vulnerable, insecure voting system or process.”
Colorado spent more than a decade building the election system voters use today.
The handbook argues some of those decisions deserve another look.
For many voters, the debate may sound complicated.
The question underneath it is not:
How do you know the count is right?
