When things go wrong at the Colorado polling stations -- the spoiled ballot

Nov. 8—When you go to vote in person, what happens if you make a mistake, or your ballot is damaged?

This reporter found out Monday when I went to vote at the Monument City Hall voting center.

Rather than fill in the bubbles on a pre-printed ballot, I decided to try El Paso County's ballot printing system instead.

Once I presented my ID and filled out the information sheet used by poll workers to confirm my voter registration record, Sam Ortiz, site coordinator for the Monument Town Hall voting station escorted me to one of two stations for electronic voting.

Ortiz thoroughly explained the system and how it worked and then used a key card to activate it.

The large touch-screen display includes hardware to allow blind persons to move through the ballot and mark their preferences using sound prompts and a tactile cursor tool, and a laser printer.

The system is not a voting machine, said El Paso County Director of Elections Angie Leath, it's a ballot marking device.

"It's not recording votes, but on the bottom of each device, it records how many ballots were printed," Leath said.

Nor is the system connected to the internet.

After making my selections for the more than 20 questions on the ballot, I double checked my entries and pressed the "print ballot" selection.

That's when the trouble started.

The laser printer made laser printer noises, but nothing came out. I asked for help and Ortiz immediately showed up to diagnose the problem, which was a paper jam that accordion-folded the partially printed ballot. Ortiz removed the "spoiled" ballot and tried printing again, but once again the ballot jammed.

Ortiz then called his tech services contact at election headquarters and came back with another sheet of paper, put it in the feed tray and tried again. This time the ballot printed properly.

The problem, it seems, was the heavier weight of the paper normally used, which caused the leading edge to catch on something inside the printer. A lighter-weight paper worked fine, and after checking it for accuracy I put my ballot into the ballot box.

Then Ortiz marked the two "spoiled" ballots across their faces with a red pen, noting the machine number.

He put both spoiled ballots in a manila envelope, which he put in a cabinet behind the registration tables.

The only criticism I had is that the envelope was not sealed closed in my presence, a criticism that El Paso County Clerk Chuck Broerman later called "fair."

The printer was replaced later that day.

Ortiz said all spoiled ballots — either ones replaced because they were incorrectly marked by the voter, or because they changed their mind, or because of a mechanical malfunction like mine — are individually sealed in envelopes and are delivered along with the day's ballots and other paperwork in sealed bags by a two-person bipartisan team every night after poll closing.

The sealed bags go to the tabulation rooms at the El Paso County Citizens Service Center at 1675 W. Garden of the Gods Road.

Broerman defended the security of the voting system in response to concerns voiced by residents about how other states run their elections.

"For the last two years we've had people who've called, and they see something that happens in Atlanta or Detroit or Nevada and they think, 'oh, that must be happening here.' And that's typically not the case," Broerman told the Denver Gazette in a joint interview with Leath Monday. "Colorado is different than the other 49 states and territories. I would encourage people not to confuse themselves with what other states do."

Secretary of State Jena Griswold has said "Colorado's elections are the nation's gold standard" repeatedly.

Asked what tabulation machines El Paso County uses, Broerman said there are two kinds.

"Our equipment is certified by the Secretary State's office. There are two vendors that have been approved and certified in the state of Colorado. It is Clear Vote, and the Dominion Democracy Suite 5-13," said Broerman.

Broerman established a drop-box video surveillance system for El Paso County in light of the documentary film "2000 Mules," produced by Dinesh D'Souza, a political commentator, filmmaker and author.

D'Souza's film challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election, claiming that ballots were illegally collected and stuffed in large numbers into ballot boxes in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

In Colorado, it is a crime to possess more than 10 ballots at a time.

"I have a team of individuals that are viewing the surveillance videos of our drop boxes so our citizens can be at ease that our boxes are secure," said Broerman. "So far we have over 3,000 hours of viewing of our drop boxes and have not seen anything inappropriate."

Broerman said his team reviewed more than 3,600 hours of video surveillance of the state's June 28 primary election and "saw nothing inappropriate."

Allegations have been made by various sources and on social media that in some states, stacks of the same ballots were seen on video being run through tabulation machines more than once in the 2020 election, but Leath says that doesn't happen here.

"That's not something that we do in our office, because like I said, they're in batches of approximately a hundred, said Leath. "They go into the envelope with the chain of custody, and every night we balance each of our tabulators. So, if the tabulators say that 900 ballots went through there, then we look at the chain of custody logs to verify that 900 ballots went through there."

All ballots are handled by bipartisan teams of two, Leath said, "every step of the way." Once a batch of about a hundred ballots has been tabulated, they are placed in a tray that is sealed inside a bag, along with chain of custody paperwork.

The ballots remain sealed until Broerman creates digital images of every ballot and the "cached vote record of how the machine read each and every ballot" after the election to be made available to the public on the internet. Then the bag is resealed for storage. By laws, ballots, including spoiled ballots, must be preserved for 25 months.

"We have very robust processes and procedures to make sure that every step of the way that we have transparency and accuracy and that citizens can validate the results," said Broerman. "After the election, I make the ballot images, and the cached vote record, how the machine read each and every ballot, available for citizens. I have a competitor, Clear Ballot, that comes in and re-tabulates the ballots to verify the accuracy of the system. I make a ballot audit tool available for our citizens so they can be their own citizen auditors at home."