[0:30] Everybody will give folks another minute or so to arrive and then we'll get started.

[1:19] All right, well, I know others will be joining as we go. I've heard from three different commissioners

[1:29] who will be joining somewhat late, but why don't we go ahead and get started? My name is Judge

[1:38] it's great to see all of you. I'm going to run through the agenda and what you can anticipate for today.

[1:47] We're going to start off by talking about the 2026 legislative cycle and the bills that relate

[1:54] to elections and Alex's Alex got it. On the screen is going to make that presentation.

[2:02] Feel free to ask any questions you have or make any comments about how the legislative cycle went and anything you anticipate in the future.

[2:14] Then I will do a summary of how the 2026 primary election was conducted.

[2:22] Show you some statistics and interesting facts about that.

[2:26] election. And again, you're open to asking any questions or making comments. And then Neil McBurnett,

[2:36] who does not appear to be on the screen, has time on the agenda to talk about some of the auditing

[2:45] ideas that he and others have been working on in the state. So he has for a little bit of time on the

[2:51] then. So he's the last one of the formal speakers. Then we have time for all of you to bring

[2:58] up new topics if you have anything you want to discuss. And then there is a public portion of the

[3:07] meeting where the public can make comments and remember that those are reserved for a two minute

[3:14] comment, period, and try to be conscientious about what people are talking about, and if you're

[3:22] just making the same comment, the previous comment are made, please understand that we are paying

[3:29] attention to what people are commenting to. Alright, well why don't we go ahead and get started,

[3:35] and I'm going to hand it over to Alex, and I think he has a presentation that will load up on the screen.

[3:53] And folks, see that.

[3:56] Good.

[3:58] We're just getting back up to my meeting.

[4:02] Then what?

[4:03] I'll hide money.

[4:04] How it's got our director of government affairs.

[4:06] We just giving a quick overview of the 26th legislative session.

[4:11] And just highlighting a couple of the bills that primarily had to do with elections, as Judd mentioned.

[5:00] President, under earlier Simpson. Good to see you. But yeah, so the general assembly convened on January 14, adjourned, May 13. There were 633 bills introduced, 3124 of those past. You can see the break down there from the House and Senate and current resolutions.

[5:21] and then as specifically for elections, there were 17 bills total that I introduced that were

[5:28] focused on or related to elections and then eight of those tasks and nine of those failed

[5:34] and I will be talking about some of those specifically that did ultimately pass.

[5:41] So the big one is our modifications to elections bill, hospital 261113,

[5:47] ultimately known as the cleanup bill, or the omnibus election bill,

[5:52] pertains a slew of changes and proposals as it relates to elections,

[5:57] typically this is legislation that all the election stakeholders, advocates,

[6:03] administrators work together and the majority of the bill tends to be

[6:07] technical cleanup just fixing kind of makes some tweaks there based on lessons

[6:12] that we learned or just kind of new things that popped up during previous

[6:16] cycles as well as some you know policy changes that I will kind of touch on here as well.

[6:22] So the big one I think is extended voting windows.

[6:28] These move from 22 days to 29 days as to when county clerks may begin mailing out their ballots.

[6:36] The idea here was getting in line with some other states around the nation that have longer early

[6:41] the early voting windows as it relates to mail ballots and then also giving voters more

[6:47] time to receive their ballots, as well as make sure they get it back, get it in the mail

[6:52] stream if they need to or more time to find a drop off drop it off there. Or if there's any issues

[6:59] come up, they have more time to work with a local county clerk to get a replacement ballots

[7:04] or just make sure they have both ample time and opportunities to vote and troubleshoot

[7:09] would have thing to do. Along with that, there was also a change to open Dropboxes earlier from

[7:16] 15 to 22 days. This is also, you know, to ensure that voters have aren't sitting on their

[7:22] ballot longer than they need to. Following that, this is a change there that prohibits any candidates

[7:31] seeking a third term of the presidency from appearing on Colorado ballots. Colorado statute was

[7:38] somewhat silence on whether federal and some state candidates to certain extent

[7:46] if they need to meet all the qualifications as athletes out in the constitution.

[7:50] And so this is almost a cleanup measure or a technical change just to clarify that every

[7:56] candidate has to meet the obligations that are stated by their governing statute whether that

[8:00] or federal.

[8:04] Another one there is kind of just in response to just concerns of changes or quick

[8:13] changes to federal election law and how it affects state law and how we run our elections

[8:17] given that we are. How many days out from the election jump?

[8:24] We're 82 days. 82 days and so there

[8:28] tends to be a bit of uncertainty about, you know, if there are any changes at federal law or

[8:33] kind of programmatic things at the federal level, that color will be able to run the elections

[8:40] as required by Title 1. And so if something comes up or county clerks and election administrators

[8:49] in the state are not able to need their statutory obligations to be these recent changes,

[8:53] makes it clear that the governor has the ability to declare an emergency and we can all work together to ensure that we can run our elections and clients with, you know, state and federal law and put that.

[9:09] Moving on.

[9:11] There's a new provision that requires strict retain of custody requirements for election materials in the event of.

[9:21] of a court order warrants or anything like that, and just makes it clear that folks know

[9:27] if they are being requested to hand over sent election materials or election records

[9:33] or voting equipment, things like that, that there's a clear process that just laid out

[9:39] that they know that they have to follow, so things that we kind of saw that what happened in Georgia, there was a lot of confusion about

[9:47] What records are being requested and where they went and we wanted to make sure that there is a paper trail

[9:53] So just speak on anything that goes and where it goes as it leads to all types of election documents

[10:00] Or, the statewide voter database, or the non-fidivist. Yeah, database into the statewide voter registration system by July 1, 2021.

[10:10] This will have, this will be a lot of work to do, but I know folks have been wanting it for a while.

[10:16] And we'll make our kind of systems a lot better, and all that's in there.

[10:22] Change the age eligibility requirements for a student election judge from 16 to 15.

[10:29] allows voters to request time off in order to vote at any time while VFCs are open.

[10:34] Instead of as current law, the employers will charge to give someone two hours to vote on election day.

[10:40] And so this gives votes more ability and kind of more ability to actually use vote when it works for them.

[10:51] Creates need reporting requirements for counties with one or more VFCs experience in a way time and access of one hour.

[10:58] privacy person from being selected as a watcher if the person's been

[11:01] victim of certain election offenses or of committing or conspiracy to commit

[11:06] certain federal offenses. And lastly, allows an electorate to take printed

[11:11] or written materials of their choice into a VPSPC as a resource for voting.

[11:27] Beyond

[11:27] that, cup more kind of election-related legislation. This one, hospital 26, 10, 23

[11:36] a political party liability for excess political requirements.

[11:39] This one in my view was also a bit of a cleanup measure, just clarified that the state party

[11:45] is responsible and, you know, as to make sure that any request for accessible participation

[11:52] will be met and it's not a, it's not solely on a volunteer at one of these, you know,

[11:59] precinct meeting or caucus and it's the analysis on the state party.

[12:05] House Bill 26, 1038 County Commission of redistricting, this one largely requires if a county nominates there that they use an independent redistricting commission that is not the county commissioners.

[12:20] That's like the board that they're required to create an independent body similar to that we have for state and federal races.

[12:28] for Burberry District

[12:32] and

[12:36] Hospital 26, 10, 84 voter transparency and ballot measures.

[12:42] This, there was a similar measure back in, I think, 21, that requires additional required

[12:47] language for ballot measures to further inform voters.

[12:50] This is another one like that where part of the Fifth Impact Statement and ballot information

[12:55] booklet and three four says the initiative measures that require state spending, so ones like

[13:01] I think, as initiative 350,

[13:05] and a couple of years back, that's to make sure that the measures

[13:08] states where the money will be coming from in which top three program areas will be affected by that.

[13:18] House full 26, 1293,

[13:22] modernization of requirements for ballot information booklet.

[13:25] As I mentioned in the note, primarily it's a clean and measure, codifying certain

[13:29] current practices that LCS does with the blue book and just makes it a bit more modern,

[13:36] at least the statute. But voters should not see any significant changes to how the blue books

[13:42] pertains to them and it doesn't look like that.

[13:46] And House Bill 26, 13, 20, accessible language

[13:50] set. That should be a delicate title requirements. This one is in response to a lot of folks.

[13:57] the shared common feeling that ballot titles are confusing to voters and so this largely

[14:03] encourages title board to use language that is accessible and more widely understood to

[14:08] someone who is reading that measure at any grade level effectively. Additionally, current

[14:14] law requires certain language be placed in certain places in the ballot title and this allows

[14:22] title board to move that around, place it anywhere in the title with the theory being they

[15:00] And then lastly, Senate bill 2659, multiple elected offices, prohibited for general assembly, this just privacy member of the general assembly can hold any other elected offices while serving.

[15:13] And there are certain exemptions in there, for special districts, as I mentioned, and kind of some of the other exemptions kind of contemplate if there was a change in election versus due to like a vacancy nomination or term ending support.

[15:27] stuff like that. And so this is largely a general assembly measure. This does not affect

[15:33] candidates, the or axis of the ballots. This is strictly enforced, so to speak, by the general

[15:40] assembly.

[15:44] And those are the ones I've highlighted here, but I'm happy to take any questions

[15:49] or kind of open this up if there's any other comments on some of the bills that we discussed.

[15:53] We've

[16:06] done a couple of handrails. If you just want to shout out your question, that'd be great.

[16:16] Hi, I'm a quick question, and the apologies if you covered this earlier.

[16:21] When do these go into effect? Are they for the general or are they different timelines?

[16:30] Yeah, so it depends on the specific bill itself.

[16:34] The big election bill that I covered at the beginning, that has various timelines.

[16:39] that went initially had a safety clause for the build generally, but certain provisions, such

[16:44] as the extended mail ballot times, that was that to take effect after the primary election,

[16:52] because when the bill passed, though, it had been too close for the counties to work with

[16:56] the vendors, to just make sure they can apply with that. And so that has varying effective dates throughout

[17:02] the build. And as far as the other ones, I don't remember off top my head, which had a safety

[17:08] clause or petition clause in that. But if it had a petition clause, everything, everything

[17:14] with a petition clause went into effect, I think yesterday, two days ago, and so if not

[17:22] in the bill specific about when it took effect either immediately or some other time in the

[17:29] future.

[17:33] And I note that there's a question in the audience. I just heads up that the audience

[17:39] will have an opportunity to do a two minute address to the commission, but it's not a back and

[17:48] forth question answer period. So if you'd like to make a comment later, when we open the

[17:55] mics, just feel free to raise your hand at that time. Any other questions or comments for Alex

[18:02] among the commissioners

[18:11] and do not apologize, Christina.

[18:15] All right, well, I think we've added a couple of new people, that's great, and we, I know we're having, we'll have more people as we go because there will be a couple of people who weren't able to attend early on.

[18:32] But why don't we switch to my presentation, which is on the 2026 primary election?

[18:38] Let me get that up,

[19:07] you know,

[19:11] hold on just like, you won't, uh,

[19:38] there we go, that's gonna work.

[20:00] All right, so let me walk you through our 2026 primary election. I've got a bunch of sort of the normal kinds of statistics, but we have had a couple of times in recent elections when you all have asked for some special statistics and I did take note of that and have added some of those to this presentation.

[20:26] and so hopefully I've addressed some of the questions, but I always like to talk at the beginning

[20:33] about voter registration because voter registration at least in a state that has voter registration

[20:39] is the lifeblood of a successful election. So here are the nuts and bolts of voter registration

[20:47] in the state of Colorado. We have both electronic and paper ways that you can register to vote,

[20:54] most of our registrations and updates occur electronically. Our automatic voter registration

[21:00] has been pretty extraordinarily successful at sort of meeting our voters where they are

[21:08] and getting registrations and updates through a natural course of your interactions with the

[21:14] government when you get a driver's license or update that driver's license. So that's what you

[21:24] a leader on that over half of our voter registrations and updates occur just naturally over

[21:31] the course of a person's interaction with the government and are not based solely on trying

[21:37] to do that for an election. However, if you want to make a registration change or you want

[21:45] to register to vote for the first time, you can use online voter registration and I just wanted

[21:52] the note that there are two ways to access that, both using your driver's license number,

[21:58] but also your Social Security number, 98.81% of our voter registration file, our voters have

[22:08] a DL on file, and then 99.5% essentially of our voter registration files have a Social Security

[22:19] number on them. So, a very, very high percentage of our population can access that through online

[22:27] voter registration, access their voter registration file. And that information on the file allows

[22:34] us to do a very good list maintenance on those files. We also do Section 7, NVRA compliance,

[22:43] which is registrations while you're receiving government services. And then it's not unusual at

[22:48] that we will get online voter registration drives, so these are outside groups that are trying

[22:56] to encourage people to register to vote or update. And then we have paperways that people

[23:01] can register. I wouldn't note that now over the years this has become less and less of the focus

[23:07] of our voters were now under 10% of our registrations coming in by paper.

[23:14] Just to give you some

[23:16] numbers from this year. This is the new registrations that we're getting through the DMV.

[23:23] I just want to emphasize the way that that works and you all probably have driver's licenses or

[23:30] state IDs, so you have had this experience. But when you go and do the DMV to get a driver's license

[23:46] It's all about identity and you must stand in front of another government official and produce those to get a driver's license

[23:54] That's why we feel like and I think pretty much every election and professional feels like

[23:59] That interaction is the best that's sort of the holy grail of getting very good voter registration data

[24:07] And making sure that we know exactly who we're talking to and

[24:12] And for us, we are average in around 14,000 new registrations each month, sometimes that number

[24:18] is higher, especially in the summer, and it's lower in the winter, especially February

[24:23] with the fewer days, so that this is a trend line that we see across every year.

[24:30] And when we first started the, like, purely automatic voter registration in 2020, 2020 doesn't

[24:37] really count because it was such an odd year.

[25:00] And that's just the subject of the fact that we have more people who are 15, 16, 17 years of age, and then more people who are moving to the state. So these numbers are gradually taking up.

[25:12] Okay, some broader voter registration numbers. This, these sets of bars, the bluest of the bars being the most recent and the lightest of the bars being the furthest back.

[25:24] show our voter registration trends over the years.

[25:29] I always need to do a quick definition of what it is to be an active voter,

[25:34] and what it is to be an inactive voter,

[25:36] so an active voter in the state of Colorado,

[25:38] and frankly, 44 states around the country.

[25:42] Our voters where we have a good faith belief that the voter lives

[25:48] at the address that they have on file or resides at that address.

[25:52] So, those active voter numbers, you can see, have

[25:57] trended up about a million people over the last decade,

[26:02] corresponding to the growth and population in the state of Colorado.

[26:05] And then also Colorado is a comparatively young state,

[26:10] compared to, especially many states in the north.

[26:13] And so our population is younger, and we tend to have

[26:16] more children that become adults.

[26:20] And so that number is related to that.

[26:24] An inactive voter is a voter who formerly was an active voter,

[26:29] but when we sent them a ballot or we sent them some other mailing,

[26:33] that mailing was rejected as undeliverable.

[26:36] And that confirmation mailing was sent to confirm

[26:39] that that person no longer lives at that address,

[26:42] and that comes back as undeliverable.

[26:44] Now we know that we have a person who's moved,

[26:47] and we don't know where they moved.

[26:49] So we're going to inactivate that voter registration until

[26:53] such time as we learn where they've moved in the state.

[26:57] And if we never learn where they've moved,

[26:59] then we're going to eventually cancel them.

[27:01] And that's going to happen over the course of two general elections,

[27:04] which so typically we're talking about four years or thereabouts,

[27:08] where somebody is in this inactive status.

[27:11] And then eventually they become a canceled voter.

[27:15] We also, on this page, have pre-registered voters.

[27:17] these are registered voters who are below the age of 18. So they are not officially registered,

[27:24] they are pre-registered. And that number has been pretty steady in the 60,000 or so over the

[27:31] last several years. But it changed this last year when we moved up to 104,000. And that is because

[27:39] we added one more year where a person could be registered of a prior to terminating teams. So we added

[27:45] 15-year-olds, you might ask for self, why on earth would we add 15-year-olds? Well, we added 15-year-olds

[27:52] because there are a lot of people in the state who will get a driver's permit at 15, but then

[27:59] not have an official DMV transaction until after they're 18. And so we wanted to catch that group of people who

[28:07] were 15 so that we could have that government interaction and get them registered to vote or at least

[28:13] in this case pre-register. So that's why that number took that. But we have around 100,000 people

[28:19] who are pre-registered right now. Just a interesting note that the vast majority of those, as you'll

[28:28] see with a remainder of the Colorado voter population, are unafiliated, but among those who are

[28:37] affiliated, slightly more of them are affiliated as Republicans than as Democrats.

[28:42] So that's a trend line that's somewhat different than what's happening in the state.

[28:48] This is party registration over that same period of time.

[28:51] So I literally pulled this from last month.

[28:54] So we are now over 50% on affiliated in the state of Colorado.

[29:00] 22.5% Republican and 24.8% Democrat.

[29:04] If you go back 12 years to 2014, we were a plurality Republican state at 37 percent, 32 for Democrats and 29 for unaffiliated.

[29:16] But the unaffiliated number has really rocketed up over the last 12 years, and there's the other trends that are happening through those populations.

[29:25] And then, by the way, the other category is also growing and if you think about it in terms

[29:32] of its specific increase, it's almost doubled over the last 10 years, people choosing one

[29:39] of the non-traditional political parties.

[29:44] All right, let's shift to the primary.

[29:47] So this is where we started. These were our voter count at the beginning of the election.

[29:56] We had 1,7,781 Democrats.

[30:00] Are the turnouts of the 177,000 Democrats, 486,000 of them voted over about 48 percent. Of the Republicans,

[30:14] 909,000 active voters, 371,000 voted, which was about 41 percent. And are affiliated, who had to pick a ballot, were, again, about 2,582,000 of them voted.

[30:29] around 28%. Of the people who were registered to vote as a libertarian, 10% of them voted,

[30:37] and of the 30,000 who are registered as unity party members, about 6%.

[30:44] Now I have to, so this is one of those references I made earlier. In the past one of these meetings,

[30:52] I was asked, hey, can you show me parties switching during this time? So do we have a lot of

[30:59] Democrats switching to Republican or Republicans switching to Democrat, you could also have an

[31:04] unafiliated picking a party which we do occasionally, but you don't have to do that during that period

[31:10] of time because you'll get both ballots. But this question's come up so I hadn't pulled the information.

[31:18] You can see here that the left-hand column is what the previous party was, the across column,

[31:26] left to right column is the new party. So there were about 1,000 new Democrats during this

[31:35] period, but if you look at the right-hand column, they lost about 789 people. So if you look

[31:44] at that 1,07 and the 789, there was about a 200-person difference where the Democratic party

[31:51] added 200 voters. On Affiliated interestingly was 1372, but if you look at the right column,

[31:59] it's 1370. So there was basically a net wash of on Affiliated people switching back and

[32:05] forth between having a party designation or not. And then on the Republican side, the Republican

[32:11] Party gained 505, but lost 702. So that they were down about 200 voters. But you can see that

[32:21] you go like specifically tap into the given columns. There were 100 Republicans who switched to

[32:30] the Democratic Party and there were 66 Democrats that switched to the Republican Party. That's

[32:38] an often a question we get. Turns out there's not a lot of switching that goes on. This is in

[32:43] the month prior to and during a primary election. So you would think like the prime time when you

[32:50] see people switching and of course there's a deadline in there but you would think that that would be

[32:56] when you would see switching and there's really just not a lot of switching. The biggest switches

[33:02] were the unaffiliated who were switching to both parties but it seems like about a two and a half to

[33:11] one margin to the Democratic Party. Any questions? I'll stop right there because there's a lot of

[33:20] any questions about that one.

[33:24] And we can always come back to it, finally.

[33:28] All right, we'll just

[33:29] keep going forward. So the breakdown of unafiliated voters, so of that group of unafiliated voters,

[33:36] that 580,000, 418,000 of them picked a Democratic ballot, and 164,000 of them picked a Republican

[33:45] not, so it's about 72 to 28%. And 103 of them picked a unity ballot. You might think

[33:53] to yourself a way to make it happen to the libertarians, while the libertarians

[33:57] when they designated themselves for a primary, they closed the right of unafiliated to participate

[34:06] in their election. So they said, no, we don't want unafiliated to participate in our election,

[34:12] which as a third party they are permitted to do. So that's what they did. So they did not permit

[34:18] any Democrats or any unafiliated, unafiliated, to be able to switch out like the Democrat and Republican cards did.

[34:30] All right, so this is the overall numbers of accepted ballots. I don't know, I lost some graphics there.

[34:36] This is, you can see that overall we had 535,000 votes for the Republican, a Republican

[34:43] card, so a Republican ballot, and 904,000 Democratic cards were voted.

[34:51] I'm going to go through, I have these sort of heat map slides, again, sort of a different

[34:58] way of viewing some of this.

[35:00] And some of it, I'm going back to the beginning, but you'll kind of see where I'm going. So this is the number of active voters across counties. Often people don't know this, but El Paso County is the most populous county. Both in terms of raw population, but also in terms of registered and active voters. They have over 500,000 active voters, Denver is number two, at 460, 4000. And then Jefferson County in a Rapo County,

[35:29] or three and four. If you look at actual votes cast in that sort of heat map review, Jefferson

[35:40] County had the highest note, I'm sorry, Denver County had the highest and then followed by

[35:44] Jefferson County and El Paso County. And again, sort of pretty closely map matches where we have

[35:52] active voters. Let's look at percentage, though. So this is the accepted ballot percentage

[35:58] cross the counties for the states. I'll just let you know information that's coming

[36:05] on a later slide, which is the overall percentage turnout was 36% of active

[36:12] voters. So anytime you see a county less than 36.5, they were below the average.

[36:19] Anything above is above the average. We had a couple of counties with really stand out.

[36:24] Turn out Jackson County's kind of the one that stands out as the darkest on the screen

[36:31] and then Washington, Kyua, Rio Blanco. I would note for those long-time listeners,

[36:38] first-time colors, mineral county, almost always wins this race. They almost always have the

[36:45] highest turnout in mineral minerals down in the southwest kind of cornerish. They are six in this

[36:53] So, I am going to call Erin Witz and ask her what's going on in the mineral county that she has given up her throne.

[37:01] But there were clearly some very interested voters in many of the counties that were mentioning here.

[37:10] And turnout was pretty good across much of the metro as well, in some of the more populous counties.

[37:17] But we did see quite low turnout in Adams County,

[37:22] Weld County, Morgan County, and that pulled down the state quite a bit.

[37:33] Let's talk about in-person numbers, so in-person we had about 24,000 people vote in-person.

[37:40] The largest county in terms of in-person votes was Denver and it wasn't even close.

[37:46] They had twice as many in-person ballots cast as any other county in the state and followed by Jefferson and then El Paso County.

[37:57] Again, I can do this by percentage. So this is the percentage turnout of in-person votes cast for that county.

[38:06] We would typically see around 1.5% stay wide in this election we were 1.7% so slightly higher

[38:15] than we typically would.

[38:16] What that means is 98.3% voted a mail ballot that was mailed to them or perhaps they came

[38:23] in and got it in person but chances are it was mailed to them and then 1.7% voted in person

[38:31] Denver County was very high this year. I think there was a lot of activism among younger

[38:36] voters and younger voters tend to be the group that votes in person at the higher

[38:40] percentage. But you can see there are other counties where there was a pretty high

[38:44] percentage of in-person voters. Lake County had a very high percentage. I'm gonna

[38:49] guess why Lake County was a little different than we would typically see. And that

[38:55] was because they had a very dangerous situation there with a fire that was right

[38:59] across the ridge from them, and at times during the election cycle was as close to say three to five miles.

[39:07] And my guess is that they had some displaced population in that county that was taking the opportunity to vote in person because they didn't have access to their mailbox.

[39:19] That's probably also the case down in San Miguel County, where they also had some buyers.

[40:01] Okay, so this in person number, I mentioned was about 24,000, it's 24,681, that's for an average of 1.71, if you think in terms of did this voter vote a Democratic ballot or did this voter vote a Republican ballot?

[40:18] Again, not necessarily registered Democrats and registered voters because unafiliated could vote one or either of the ballots.

[40:26] but if you just broke it down in terms of what ballot was cast,

[40:32] slightly higher percentage of democratic ballots

[40:35] were cast in person than Republican ballots,

[40:38] we're casting person.

[40:43] This is the famous hockey stick slide.

[40:47] It's not as much a hockey stick this time.

[40:49] I don't know, I don't know,

[40:50] I don't think about what that image looks like

[40:51] and see if I can come up with a new image,

[40:54] or a new, new framing of it.

[40:55] But it's we did have a lot of activity comparatively on the Monday and Tuesday of election

[41:06] week instead of solely on election day, and because of that, you know, we picked up quite

[41:12] a bit in that Monday prior to election day, but overall, that's the 24,685.

[41:19] I would just note that there are often discussions and, you know, not in this, you know,

[41:27] celebratory group here, but among others who are less sophisticated in elections, who believe

[41:33] that having the same day registration will open us up to potential voter fraud, because

[41:41] there will be large groups of people who will come in to register for the first time and vote

[41:47] on using vaporities and so forth.

[41:51] This number that you're seeing on the screen,

[41:54] comparatively given different elections

[41:56] that have different numbers is pretty consistent with what

[42:00] we see, which is a very low percentage

[42:02] of our voters coming in to register new during the election.

[42:09] If they are coming in to do anything to their file,

[42:12] they're updating, and then they're voting.

[42:14] But most people who come and go to a VSPC on election day or before, they are just there

[42:21] to vote in person.

[42:22] Because I wanted to vote in person, and that our state law allows that.

[42:27] So in this particular election, we had 458 people registered to vote for the first time during

[42:34] the election during the active time of early voting in election day, and around 5,000 people

[42:40] made an update to their record, that's usually where they come in and they say,

[42:45] hey, what happened? I didn't get my mail ballot and they looked them up and they say, well,

[42:50] what's your address and the person says, I live at 202 L Street and they say, well, we have you

[42:55] at 101 Main Street. Ah, I moved a couple months ago. Ah, that's why you didn't get your ballot.

[43:01] Let's get you changed so we'll get you back. So that's usually the way that that works. That's

[43:05] those 5,000 come from. And then around 20,000 people just wanted to vote in person. And they

[43:12] received a ballot, they received a ballot of correct address, but they just chose to go in and vote

[43:19] at their local closest via SPC.

[43:24] All right, so let's talk about cures for a second. This is another

[43:27] thing that you have often asked me about, and I've been underwhelming in my response, so I wanted

[43:34] to give you some more statistics.

[43:37] So we had statewide about 15,500 ballots

[43:41] that could have been cured.

[43:44] So we reject for various reasons.

[43:47] The majority of the rejection reasons are curable.

[43:50] That means somebody's signature on the back of that envelope

[43:54] doesn't match closely enough with the signature we have

[43:57] on file and so we have to reject it.

[43:59] Or somebody's signature line is blank

[44:01] on the back of that ballot.

[44:03] And so we don't have a signature to compare to that's another curable mistake and then the last one is we have some voters not a lot

[44:12] But we have some voters who are ID deficient. They don't have an ID on their file and so in order to vote their mail mail

[44:19] Now they have to produce a copy of their ID. That's a pretty labor intensive process and a lot of those get rejected

[44:26] Because you know doing a photocopy of an ID is kind of painful for that reason

[44:32] those are often rejected. We have to go back to them again and ask for another ID. That's another

[44:37] curable option. So those three are the typical curable amounts. You can see that we had around 2300

[44:46] in Al Paso County that could have been cured. We had around 1700 in Denver that could have been

[44:53] and a rapoh about 1400 and so forth. So these are all in the...

[45:00] All four of those counties have fewer than 1,000 registered voters. It's, you know, the case that that population doesn't change a lot and we're unsupervised by the fact that there are not a lot of cures in those counties.

[45:15] But let me give you the percentage cure for the counties that have cures.

[45:22] So, of those counties, overall, we cured around 35%, 35%, I think it's actually 36%, 36% is very typical for when we start with a body of 15,500 people.

[45:41] We would expect that around 6,000 of those people would cure. That's very typical, and that's what we saw in this election.

[45:48] Some of the counties that are standouts here, again counties with very small populations

[45:53] all they have to have is a couple of people cure and their numbers are very high.

[45:57] But in the Metro, El Paso County was slightly below the average, Denver again also slightly

[46:04] below the average.

[46:05] But then we had some that were above the average, like Jefferson County, Mason County was

[46:10] slightly above the average.

[46:12] So, we don't really have a good handle on what's the driving force of cures, other than close races.

[46:23] And we didn't really have a lot of close races this time.

[46:27] So, we have no idea why some of this is the way it is.

[46:31] But we just make the cure options available to people so that they can do.

[46:36] provisional ballots. We had 34 provisional ballots cast in the 2026 state primary. Seven of those were accepted and 27 of them were rejected. Again, this is pretty typical. We usually go 3 to 1, rejected over accepted and then we had one of those ballots was a person I don't actually know the backstory on this but I can imagine.

[47:02] It was a person who was not registered, could not register, but insisted on voting, so they

[47:08] were issued a provisional ballot that was merely rejected, even though they could

[47:12] actually fill out the form.

[47:16] Why would we issue a provisional ballot?

[47:18] Lots of these are, I'm in my RV, I'm driving across the country, I'm in Colorado today.

[47:25] Hey, it's election day, I should go vote.

[47:28] Well, you're not a resident of Colorado, and you have no basis to vote in the Colorado election,

[47:34] but if you want to insist and fill out the form, you can do that. We'll just reject your ballot.

[47:40] So that's a lot of it. Only the small category of, I forgot my ID when I came in the vote in person,

[47:49] I'm going to do a provisional, and then I'm going to provide an ID later, are the ones that are accepted.

[47:58] Okay, and then Canvas board, so this is another thing that I've been asked about in the past, so we wanted to create a slide for you.

[48:07] In this election, 59 of our counties unanimously approved their Canvas report.

[48:14] Five counties did not get a unanimous sign off on the Canvas report.

[48:19] Those counties are the many of the metro gangs,

[48:24] Harapaho Boulder, Douglas, El Paso, and Jefferson.

[48:29] In each of those cases, a Republican representative to the canvas board

[48:33] with help there approval, so they all pass to one, except for Douglas.

[48:38] Douglas, I believe, is the only county in the state that has more than three members of a canvas board.

[48:45] They have a five person canvas board, so they have two Democrats, two Republicans,

[48:48] comes in the county clerk. And in Douglas County, one of the Republican Canvas Board members

[48:55] signed the Canvas, but the other one did not. So they had a 401 as opposed to these two ones

[49:00] that I mentioned above. The five counties not signing, it's become kind of typical. This is not

[49:18] in each given election, where the Canvas Board doesn't sign off.

[49:23] They often will say, we're going to write a minority report.

[50:00] Why they're choosing to not sign up on the campus.

[50:07] All right, so ballot tracks.

[50:09] Ballet tracks continues to be a pretty extraordinarily successful program that we rolled out during the 2020 cycle.

[50:17] During, again, to go back, remember we have about 4 million active registered voters, about 2.2 million of them received ballot tracks notices.

[50:31] The contact method, I have a better slide on contact methods, so I'll hold that.

[50:36] You can see it's slightly weighted toward democratic and, of course, not affiliated voters,

[50:42] but as a percentage, slightly weighted toward democratic voters.

[50:48] But for the most part, it's pretty much a wash.

[50:50] The county that has the most highest percentage of Douglas county, they seem to be county with the highest percentage of emails on their voter file.

[51:04] And then, said to the county, year after year, year is our lowest percentage ballot track use.

[51:11] Honestly, don't, no idea what's happening in Central County. I should have endeavored to find that out.

[51:18] Here's more information so of the 2 million people that are receiving their notices about 87% of them are getting their notices through their email.

[51:31] But 250,000 or so are getting their notices by a text message and another 25,000 are getting voices.

[51:39] So can I just tell you what that means? What that means is that 250,000 people went on to the website

[51:46] and said, I don't want to get an email, I want to get a text. So just that sort of gives

[51:53] credence to the idea that they're pretty engaged populists because they're not just passively

[51:58] receiving this information. They're actually going and saying, no, I want it this way or I want

[52:03] it these various ways. And the total number does not match up because the many people are receiving

[52:12] their notices and multiple ways, like, for instance, me. I receive all three of us. And yes,

[52:19] it's very annoying. But that's okay. I just want to make sure it all works. And, you know,

[52:26] it's part of the gate. So, so I'll get all of these notifications. I know many other people are

[52:32] like that too, especially the staff and the elections division. They often we are the ones

[52:38] that are receiving the multiple notifications.

[52:41] All right.

[52:42] While I have your wrapped attention,

[52:44] I will do a little plug for Colorado

[52:47] and the big team of things.

[52:50] This is Colorado's motor registration rate,

[52:52] compared to the country based on the 2024 general election data.

[52:59] I've done a UR here pointer.

[53:02] We are in third on the list of highest percentage registered of any U.S. states.

[53:12] The two above us are the district of Columbia.

[53:17] They don't even count. They're not a state.

[53:20] So it's actually where actually in second place among the states.

[53:24] The state immediately ahead of us is Maryland.

[53:27] and Maryland is always a very high percentage in this,

[53:31] so we're just a little bit behind them,

[53:34] but we will endeavor to catch them.

[53:37] This is, I know this is a very busy slide,

[53:39] but the most of it's up in this blue.

[53:43] This is our voter registration over the years,

[53:45] going back to 2016,

[53:47] and then our turnout percentage among active voters

[53:50] during those same years.

[53:53] Or I'm sorry among eligible voters,

[53:55] during that same period of time. So you can see we've been steadily in the 92

[54:00] estranged of registered voters among eligible and then we are in presidential years voting

[54:09] that around 72, 74, 76% and then the congressional years were in the say 60% range.

[54:18] So based solely on these statistics I would expect this fall that we would have about 60% turn out

[54:24] for this general election in 82 days.

[54:29] Let's see, I think I have two more.

[54:31] This is Colorado compared to the average national turnout.

[54:36] Again, of eligible voters, if you go back to 2000,

[54:40] we were basically a run of the middle of the pack state.

[54:44] But over time, we have separated from the rest of the country

[54:47] or at least on average the rest of the country.

[54:50] And we are not consistently about 10% higher turnout

[54:53] in the rest of the country, in both sets of elections, both presidential and congressional elections.

[55:00] One to one comparison. But for the ones that we do all hold, Colorado's really quite good. Why is that? Well, my argument would be, it's because of our excellent policies and the fantastic people that implement those policies. So we have been really focused in this office and throughout the state, the CCCA as well, to pass the best possible laws we can to both be safe and secure.

[55:30] but also providing people of the great opportunity to register and to get their ballots.

[55:35] And then we're trying to do our very best to count those ballots which are fairly

[55:42] and accurately cast. And then the last thing I'll put you in relation to the rest of the country.

[55:53] So these are the states that typically are top five, top six, top 10 states in terms of turnout.

[56:00] In 2000 Colorado again, not a great state, but since then we've done a lot to try to make

[56:08] ourselves more attractive state for people to register into vote and over time we've gotten

[56:15] to be one of the really high performing states and for a couple of cycles we were right behind

[56:21] Minnesota.

[56:23] But we're now back down to about third or fourth and I'll just note that there are various

[56:29] you can calculate this. I've seen other ones which say that we're six. I don't like those. I

[56:35] like the ones where we are fourth. Occasionally, though, we are better in those other ones. That's

[56:40] when I like those. But for the most part, we are, by one measure, this is one particular measure,

[56:48] we're at top five state in turnout over the last decade. All right, I think that's me. Yes,

[56:57] So I will stop sharing if anybody has any questions or thoughts about some of those. I'm happy to discuss them and we know I could pull them back up if you want to dive in

[57:17] or perhaps it was such a brilliant presentation.

[57:21] all questions were answered.

[57:30] Glad to know you're all fine with it. Alright, so that was

[57:36] me. We also have on the agenda Neil McBernett who's going to tell us about some of the

[57:44] work that he's been doing. I know Matt Creme also had, he was, Matt was going to do the intro

[57:51] to Neil. So let me hand it to Matt so you can

[57:54] enjoy me. Sure. Thanks, Judd. And get out of

[57:57] noon, everybody. It's good to see you all. You know,

[58:00] we just wanted to provide a brief update on something

[58:02] that we have been working on. It's been 10 years

[58:07] since Colorado was the first state to do a statewide

[58:09] risk limiting audit. And we thought that this was a

[58:12] good time to take a look at that process. I think most

[58:15] experts would agree. I mean, including Philip

[58:18] Starcoath, you know, who's the creative

[58:19] of all the states that are doing this, Colorado does it the best, however, that doesn't mean that

[58:25] there isn't room for improvement and that we can't push to get better and provide better data

[58:30] and hopefully better confidence to voters that our elections are above board and honest.

[58:36] So we've convened a small working group that includes Judd and others from the Secretary of State's office.

[58:43] There are few counties representative of different county sizes and regions involved.

[58:47] And we have elections, stakeholders, like Neil Nick Burnett, and Philip Upsdark, who are also

[58:52] part of these conversations, where we're really diving down into what our risk limiting

[58:56] audit process looks like what was the original design of the risk limiting audit, and then

[59:01] how we can update it and prove our process here, and there's some low-hanging fruit that

[59:07] we're trying to tackle, and then there's some deeper conversations.

[59:11] There are things that are pretty easy to identify, like who picks the races, it's not

[59:17] best practice to have the racist chosen by somebody is there a random way that we can get to

[59:22] selecting a racist. What can we do to publish and get a better sense of confidence about the

[59:28] non-targeted races in an RLA? And is there a way where with all of the ballots that we can pull to,

[59:34] we can get to relatively the same risk limit for all of those contests there? So those are just a

[59:41] couple of different things, you know, how can we validate this as their way that we can provide

[59:46] Outside validation right now, we have our corollatool where our audit boards enter in the selections from the

[59:54] from the voters and that's compared to the CAS vote record.

[59:57] But if there's something else that we can do to

[1:00:26] We're also excited about the work that Neil and his

[1:00:29] doing. So Neil, a lot of time it over to user. Well, thank you. And really starting off with

[1:00:36] a big thanks to Matt for leading so many important innovations in Colorado. Matt's team did the

[1:00:44] first when he was county clerk did the first ballot level risk limiting on it at scale that we've seen

[1:00:54] anywhere and continues to push the envelope there.

[1:00:59] So I really appreciate the ability to work in Colorado.

[1:01:05] I think Colorado supports what we call evidence-based elections better than any other

[1:01:11] state that I'm aware of and I try to follow lots of the states.

[1:01:15] And that's because of folks like Matt and the Clarks Association,

[1:01:19] and clerks like Tiffany Lee in La Plata County, Carly Coppice, and Welc County, Kevin

[1:01:27] Stratch and Morgan County, really this year moving the ball forward with some pilot improvements

[1:01:35] to the audit, and also to Lori Stevens and Mike Grayson, John Karen for being great colleagues

[1:01:42] with me in trying to push this process forward. And the Secretary of State's office has been doing

[1:01:48] amazing support over the years, you know, stepped up to what turned out to be a bigger task than I'm sure people thought in the beginning.

[1:01:58] And so we've got a great foundation to start on and this new Colorado RLA modernization group is trying to fill in some perceived gaps or opportunities to make it more obviously publicly verifiable and so on.

[1:02:16] And I just want to start off framing this in terms of what the problem is, there are, you

[1:02:27] all know that you vote on dozens of contests in many elections.

[1:02:32] And we think all of those contests to sort of auditing.

[1:02:36] Most places around the country are only auditing a couple of contests in each election.

[1:02:42] and a local bond issue can make a great deal of difference to people's tax rates, to people's

[1:02:50] representation locally. So in Colorado we got gather data on all the contests and while we officially

[1:03:01] target a small number typically the data that we gather really allows us to say a lot more about what's

[1:03:10] And that's even more true these days with prediction markets and people are actually placing bets on obscure aspects of elections.

[1:03:19] So what we're just trying to drive the data and the analysis to all the contests, which also helps deal with the fact that even if only a couple contests are selected, we're actually auditing and getting audited for all of them.

[1:03:39] In the last primary, the clerks that I mentioned were super in collaborating with our work

[1:03:50] to allow the data, not only the data on the manifests, which has been published in the audit

[1:03:57] center for many years to be verified and for the random selection to be verified, but to actually

[1:04:06] be able to personally verify that the audit interpretation of the ballots that are selected

[1:04:15] matches how the voting system recorded it. So let me step back a little bit to how

[1:04:21] it's actually worked for those that don't follow the details. In Colorado unlike most states,

[1:04:27] we actually publish, we actually obtained data

[1:04:33] on every individual ballot and how it was marked.

[1:05:00] Compares, that's the cast voter record, is the systems interpretation of every mark for every contest that the voter voted in.

[1:05:08] And we compare that with a person taking up a ballot by hand and looking at it and interpreting the marks. So that's the voter verified paper ballot.

[1:05:18] And one of the concerns that some people have raised is that we've often been using a different computer program, the auditing software that we wrote.

[1:05:30] to do the comparison and make sure that the ballots were recorded the way that they're actually interpreted

[1:05:40] and to deal with the very rare discrepancy that happened. So I think we had a total of just 16

[1:05:48] cases where they picked the wrong ballot by mistake and didn't notice and so on and there was a

[1:05:53] very small discrepancy across thousands of actual vote comparisons.

[1:06:05] So we gather all that data and we establish the outcome of the audit.

[1:06:12] And this year we had volunteers from places like the League of Women Voters,

[1:06:17] sitting during the audit and listening and comparing it with their own copy of that

[1:06:23] cast-foot record, properly anonymized cast-foot record, that would let them confirm for themselves,

[1:06:31] not trust another piece of software how that work. Even more exciting, some people are a little

[1:06:39] mystified by how the random selection works. They know that we roll some dice and pick some ballots

[1:06:44] based on that, but it's a little mysterious how that happened. So this time in those counties,

[1:06:49] we actually took Canvas board members and audit board members and observers and said,

[1:06:56] you know, go and pick a ballot point at a ballot. We don't have observers touching ballots,

[1:07:03] but you know, identify a ballot in a box, a paper ballot in a box, pull it out and let's see if

[1:07:12] that marks on the ballot match what we have in our

[1:07:15] cash vote record and those all matched perfectly.

[1:07:21] And similarly to look at some ballots that people thought might have been a little,

[1:07:26] they might be surprised at the combination of votes that people, you know, choices that people made

[1:07:35] in the election then again, we could select from the cash vote record and go and find

[1:07:39] the paper valet and again, you know, it feels in the moment almost like taking a rabbit out of the hat.

[1:07:45] It's like, yep, that's exactly, we found a piece of paper that matches exactly what the Caspo record said.

[1:07:52] So, that's perhaps more detailed than you want to go into, but we're just very excited to have a more human process and a more engaged process with observers to see that.

[1:08:04] and we look forward to learning some of the lessons that we had and allow that process to improve

[1:08:12] and modernize how we're doing things.

[1:08:17] I'll briefly note, I'm going to have some comments, some slides to share at some point

[1:08:23] and I'll have them ready right now, but the election assistance commission at the national level has an

[1:08:29] an audit standards process, and there were a lot of comments by people across the country.

[1:08:36] And I find them very interesting. I find them relevant to Colorado. There's a lot of interest

[1:08:42] in exactly the sort of thing that we're doing, which is moving towards more independence,

[1:08:48] and how the audit happens, and more ability for the results to be clear.

[1:08:55] And then kind of in another vein, I'm very excited to see that the Longmont Council, I'm

[1:09:01] going to leave a women voter's representative to this commission and delighted that the

[1:09:07] Longmont City Council is moving forward on a form of ranked choice voting.

[1:09:13] They've put a measure on the ballot to adopt, not just the kind that most people are familiar

[1:09:20] with that we've used in Boulder, but a proportional representation form of right choice voting

[1:09:27] called single transferable vote. And if the voters approve it, that will go to be used in

[1:09:35] 2029 elections. And so one thing that I just want to highlight, even though it's several years

[1:10:00] A particular voting method to be supported. It is already, it works in the software that we use in all the relevant

[1:10:07] counties, but we have to make sure that everything is properly certified and tested and that

[1:10:15] the election officials are prepared to support the voters in moving to this highly improved

[1:10:20] voting method. So I just want to make people aware of that and please let us know if there's anything

[1:10:28] that needs to happen on a certain timeline to make that happen,

[1:10:36] and we also have some top

[1:10:38] scholars in the world, including folks that I hope will be able to comment later in this

[1:10:44] meeting on how to audit this enhanced voting method in a way that continues to give us confidence

[1:10:54] and the results.

[1:10:58] I'll also briefly note that the League of Women Voters has been alarmed

[1:11:04] at the bill that was passed, HB25, 13, 15, that turned the general election into a closed primary

[1:11:15] election. The actual final decision in some elections, vacancy elections is being made during

[1:11:23] general election which is only in which only people of certain parties can vote and that is

[1:11:31] in violation of the US Constitution and the Colorado Constitution and so we follow lawsuit a

[1:11:38] couple months ago and I just want to again bring that to people's attention and ask for support

[1:11:48] to make sure that everybody can vote

[1:11:52] in the elections that matter to them.

[1:11:56] I'm also going to bring up a concern that I heard

[1:12:02] and I don't fully understand.

[1:12:04] So if we give me if I get something wrong,

[1:12:07] but special district voter list maintenance.

[1:12:11] When we think about the impact of small local elections

[1:12:15] on people, a special district,

[1:12:16] that's something like a metro district or a water district, a sewer district can have huge tax

[1:12:23] implications for voters in the district. Then of course huge benefits, you know, constructing

[1:12:29] roads and building sewer systems and fixing things. But there's been controversy at various

[1:12:35] times about how they structured our bonds and interest rates and concern for the need for the

[1:12:42] people who are being taxed to have input on how all that is happening.

[1:12:48] And this is particularly challenging because tax districts are the information you need to

[1:12:57] determine who can vote is part of the assessor's records because a property owner is eligible

[1:13:05] to vote about their tax rates, even if they are a local resident, so they might not be in the voter

[1:13:12] or they might live in another state, but they can still vote.

[1:13:17] And matching these records up turns out to be really hard.

[1:13:20] So I just want to put in a plug for people to pay attention

[1:13:24] to how this happens and some of the designated election officials

[1:13:28] for the special districts have some...

[1:13:34] I don't necessarily have the experience needed.

[1:13:37] it can be very complicated to get to match the people with how to contact them and how to

[1:13:45] send them their ballots. So I just wanted to flag that for people that want to dive into that.

[1:13:53] I think that's what I had on my list. Appreciate your time.

[1:13:58] All right, Neil. Thank you. Anybody have any questions for me?

[1:14:05] Just as a note on that last point, you know, we are totally at the whim of the jurisdictions that provide information to the counties.

[1:14:16] And so the way the law is written, the counties are just have to accept the list that they're given.

[1:14:24] I'm sure Mount will have some ideas about how to fix that.

[1:14:29] Yeah, I mean, some of this might require legislative fixes.

[1:14:33] I know the legislature was trying to make sure that everybody, for sure,

[1:14:38] that it was designated to get a ballot and would get one,

[1:14:42] but they're making mistakes in both directions, apparently.

[1:14:46] So, some way to make sure that these databases can actually be matched up properly.

[1:14:55] Makes sense. Again, I'm not sure.

[1:14:57] Things are always more complicated than I'd like.

[1:15:05] All right. Thank you. So this is now the part of the agenda where all of you on the screen can comment or throw out some ideas, things that you would like us to focus on in the future.

[1:15:24] you could talk about legislative initiatives you could talk about anything you want to. So any of the

[1:15:31] commissioners if you want to pipe up now you can and then we'll do an open mic with those

[1:15:39] who are in the audience.

[1:15:48] Seeing anything.

[1:15:53] Well, what I'm going to leave that there then and I am going to

[1:15:57] on my colleague, Cheryl,

[1:16:01] could you monitor the audience to see if anybody would like to make any comments?

[1:16:10] I would be happy to, if there is anybody in the attendance that has called in or is in the public.

[1:16:18] If you would like to provide comment, please raise your hand and we will call on you as your hands come up.

[1:16:24] All

[1:16:31] right, okay. Yep. All right. So we'll call on Jason Bertolachie first. I'm going to go ahead and unmute you.

[1:16:40] Hey Jason. Hey Jeff. Hey Jeff. No comment, but I just had a quick question on the plain language.

[1:16:47] Bill, the HP 261320. I'm curious. Do you think there's going to be any rule making required on that or is it legislation clear enough that you're going to just let that win implement as is

[1:17:04] I will defer to Alex or John who member once to chime in here.

[1:17:10] I would note though that we literally are promulgating rules today.

[1:17:13] I mean, they're notists on the website, so.

[1:17:17] I can chime in on that one.

[1:17:18] I think, and Alex, feel free to chime in, too.

[1:17:21] I don't believe title board has its own set of rulemaking authority, typically what title board

[1:17:25] does is work through their own guidance and work with their own legal counsel, so I think

[1:17:30] understanding what that bill is that they're going to look at the legislation and then work

[1:17:34] with their council through the Attorney General's Office and work because it's a three agency

[1:17:39] operation right between the legislature or office in the Attorney General's Office. So I don't think

[1:17:44] there's formal rule making authority nor is my recollection that bill directs them to

[1:17:50] promulgate rules, but the statute will provide the guidance that then they will take and then

[1:17:54] work amongst themselves and with their council and work to figure out how that forms into the

[1:17:59] titles that they set at Title Board.

[1:18:01] So I think that's my understanding, Alex Judd,

[1:18:04] Chen, and if you have a different understanding,

[1:18:06] but I'm pretty sure that's the general approach

[1:18:09] that that is likely to happen.

[1:18:13] Yeah, I'm hearing from Theresa Conlayers,

[1:18:17] our representative to the time board,

[1:18:20] who is telling me, yes, those will be the kinds of things

[1:18:22] we will address during the next set of hearings

[1:18:26] when they do hearings next.

[1:18:29] So, so thank you, Jason, appreciate it.

[1:18:33] And it looks like Bobby Gross.

[1:18:36] I know that name, Bobby Gross is next up.

[1:18:42] Oh.

[1:18:47] He or he did it.

[1:18:48] Yeah.

[1:18:49] Sorry.

[1:18:49] I got unmuted.

[1:18:51] Hey, just a quick comment or request.

[1:18:54] Can we get some of those stats that you provided that would be great?

[1:18:58] Oh, yeah.

[1:18:59] I'm so glad you mentioned that because what we always do is anybody that makes a formal presentation

[1:19:04] like mine and Alex's today. We post that on the BAAC BAC web page on the under the

[1:19:16] Elections Division at Secretary's State's office. So if you scroll down and

[1:19:20] believe it's under meetings or conferences, something like that under the

[1:19:25] elections, you'll see that BAC is listed there and you can go find anything

[1:19:29] from past times in which we've done these presentations. However, because you, Bobby Gross,

[1:19:38] my favorite Mason County clerk, have reached out today in the presentation. I will make sure

[1:19:46] that you get yours today. So this is over. I'll send it your way. Thank you. I appreciate that.

[1:19:51] No problem. I would like to mention that anything for the by-person election advisory commission

[1:19:57] is under laws and resources.

[1:20:00] Thank you if you unmute yourself. Okay, thank you. And it's barb winery. Oh, sorry. Oh, no worries. A lot of people mispronounce my name. Anyway, I'm up here in a really well county. And I'm also in charge of poll watchers for my party, but it's coming to my attention that there's a lot of nonpartisan coalition groups that are having poll watcher or poll monitors.

[1:20:30] or poll observers. And I'm just kind of concerned about how we're going to manage all the people

[1:20:37] who might be out attempting to do those kinds of things, this election, in addition to the

[1:20:44] approved poll watchers.

[1:20:48] Well, so under Colorado Law to be an official observer at either a

[1:21:02] designated by either our election office or potentially by the county and you would need to fit

[1:21:11] the criteria under the law to either be a watcher or to be an observer. So there are different

[1:21:18] two different ways you can go. And the people that and both of them require that you meet certain

[1:21:26] criteria and get pre-approval. In order to watch the check-in process and observe the check-in

[1:21:38] process, you and frankly a bunch of the other things where you might have access to personally

[1:21:44] identifying information. You have to take a class and be certified as a watcher or an observer

[1:21:53] to have access to that information. So we don't anticipate that there will be a lot of freelance

[1:21:59] people trying to observe because frankly it's not permitted under the law. And thus far I have not

[1:22:07] heard from a lot of either national or national groups interested in participating in observation

[1:22:14] for this election cycle. I think you're probably right that there will be party members representing

[1:22:21] the Democratic and Republican Party. But again, probably not as many as we saw in 2024 because

[1:22:30] people are just less inclined to be this level of engaged for a congressional election than

[1:22:36] they are for a presidential. But we will always, you know, try to manage through in those expectations.

[1:22:44] And if we see a surge of people, we will work with the counties to make sure that they're meeting

[1:22:50] their statutory obligations, as well as simultaneously conducting the election.

[1:22:59] Anything else?

[1:23:03] All right.

[1:23:04] Thank you, Barbara.

[1:23:10] All right.

[1:23:10] I do not see any issues.

[1:23:11] I'll just chime in that having making it easier for people to observe makes sense to me.

[1:23:20] It's much more difficult for people not affiliated with parties to observe.

[1:23:25] And, you know, of course we need to have proper security and decorum and so on.

[1:23:30] But living is important for elections.

[1:23:35] Yeah, and it's sort of county specific.

[1:23:37] There are counties where there are lots of observers or lots

[1:23:41] of watchers.

[1:23:43] Obviously, Boulder County comes to mind.

[1:23:46] They often will have so many watchers at the central

[1:23:50] campus facility that they'll have to come in in waves.

[1:23:54] Because there will be too many people in the room to be able to

[1:23:59] the group and actually do the work. So that's an example of a county that really has to be on their toes,

[1:24:10] have to have people that will manage all of the watchers and observers that are happening at that location.

[1:25:00] And I'm not familiar in any of the years that I've been here where we've gotten to a position where watchers have been overwhelming or disruptive or anything like that.

[1:25:16] Most people that want to be a watcher or an observer are really there to see what's happening and see their democracy at work.

[1:25:23] and aren't think our laws and policies do the very best

[1:25:28] to try to fluctuate that.

[1:25:33] It looks like we want to just get with that out

[1:25:35] to barb-winnery for being one of our servers

[1:25:38] during that, the RLA, so great job done there apply.

[1:25:44] Interested citizens.

[1:25:47] But this looks like migration has,

[1:25:53] Yes.

[1:25:55] Hi, Mike.

[1:25:57] Hey, Jeff.

[1:25:58] So I just have a question.

[1:25:59] You've mentioned how much growth there's been in the unaffiliated voters to the point where there are majority in and

[1:26:08] themselves, is there any conversation in your office about involving them more in the audit

[1:26:18] process, the observation, even Canvas board activities?

[1:26:25] Well, that sounds like a policy question. I'm more of a process guy, so I'm going to hand it

[1:26:31] to the policy people, John Alex Andrew, one of you, have any thoughts on that?

[1:26:44] I know this conversation, go, it's all right, go again.

[1:26:47] I mean, this conversation comes up in the election cleanup.

[1:26:51] I know I can't remember the specifics of the last conversation this year,

[1:26:54] as it related to the cleanup, but I know this is a

[1:26:57] pranegal point of conversation that I expected to come up.

[1:27:00] Next year as we look to another cleanup, especially since we ticked over that 50%

[1:27:05] but as of right now I don't have anything to speak to specifically in terms of policy changes in front

[1:27:09] of us, but that doesn't mean that isn't going to change at some point.

[1:27:13] Who would be the person that we would talk to in your office about such issues?

[1:27:23] Well, my two senses that that would be an Alex conversation.

[1:27:29] I would give Alex a call or drop him an email and he'll follow up.

[1:27:34] Okay, I'll just note that there are other, we are the Secretary of State's office,

[1:27:41] but the counties also have a big role in all of this.

[1:27:44] So, Matt or Carly or Jenny and others on the screen

[1:27:50] may very well have some thoughts on this one as well.

[1:27:55] Thank you.

[1:28:02] All right, any other questions?

[1:28:06] Comments, thoughts, predictions?

[1:28:16] All right, see, nothing.

[1:28:18] Well, hey, this has been a great meeting.

[1:28:19] We really appreciate it.

[1:28:21] And we'll be in touch soon for scheduling the next meeting.

[1:28:25] We do three of these a year, so I would expect one in the coming couple of months.

[1:28:31] Look for information related to that.

Bipartisan Election Advisory Commission

Agenda

Transcript