1
00:00:30,510 --> 00:00:36,490
Everybody will give folks another minute or so to arrive and then we'll get started.

2
00:01:19,890 --> 00:01:29,570
All right, well, I know others will be joining as we go. I've heard from three different commissioners

3
00:01:29,570 --> 00:01:38,130
who will be joining somewhat late, but why don't we go ahead and get started? My name is Judge

4
00:01:38,130 --> 00:01:46,410
it's great to see all of you. I'm going to run through the agenda and what you can anticipate for today.

5
00:01:47,410 --> 00:01:54,170
We're going to start off by talking about the 2026 legislative cycle and the bills that relate

6
00:01:54,170 --> 00:02:02,650
to elections and Alex's Alex got it. On the screen is going to make that presentation.

7
00:02:02,650 --> 00:02:12,510
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.

8
00:02:14,030 --> 00:02:21,850
Then I will do a summary of how the 2026 primary election was conducted.

9
00:02:22,130 --> 00:02:26,090
Show you some statistics and interesting facts about that.

10
00:02:26,090 --> 00:02:36,270
election. And again, you're open to asking any questions or making comments. And then Neil McBurnett,

11
00:02:36,690 --> 00:02:45,190
who does not appear to be on the screen, has time on the agenda to talk about some of the auditing

12
00:02:45,750 --> 00:02:51,790
ideas that he and others have been working on in the state. So he has for a little bit of time on the

13
00:02:51,790 --> 00:02:58,010
then. So he's the last one of the formal speakers. Then we have time for all of you to bring

14
00:02:58,010 --> 00:03:07,050
up new topics if you have anything you want to discuss. And then there is a public portion of the

15
00:03:07,050 --> 00:03:14,910
meeting where the public can make comments and remember that those are reserved for a two minute

16
00:03:14,910 --> 00:03:22,110
comment, period, and try to be conscientious about what people are talking about, and if you're

17
00:03:22,110 --> 00:03:29,210
just making the same comment, the previous comment are made, please understand that we are paying

18
00:03:29,210 --> 00:03:35,810
attention to what people are commenting to. Alright, well why don't we go ahead and get started,

19
00:03:35,890 --> 00:03:42,530
and I'm going to hand it over to Alex, and I think he has a presentation that will load up on the screen.

20
00:03:53,760 --> 00:03:55,760
And folks, see that.

21
00:03:56,920 --> 00:03:56,940
Good.

22
00:03:58,260 --> 00:04:00,460
We're just getting back up to my meeting.

23
00:04:02,160 --> 00:04:02,920
Then what?

24
00:04:03,480 --> 00:04:04,060
I'll hide money.

25
00:04:04,280 --> 00:04:06,200
How it's got our director of government affairs.

26
00:04:06,600 --> 00:04:09,970
We just giving a quick overview of the 26th legislative session.

27
00:04:11,500 --> 00:04:17,200
And just highlighting a couple of the bills that primarily had to do with elections, as Judd mentioned.

28
00:05:00,000 --> 00:05:21,640
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.

29
00:05:21,640 --> 00:05:28,700
and then as specifically for elections, there were 17 bills total that I introduced that were

30
00:05:28,700 --> 00:05:34,000
focused on or related to elections and then eight of those tasks and nine of those failed

31
00:05:34,000 --> 00:05:38,380
and I will be talking about some of those specifically that did ultimately pass.

32
00:05:41,410 --> 00:05:47,030
So the big one is our modifications to elections bill, hospital 261113,

33
00:05:47,030 --> 00:05:51,290
ultimately known as the cleanup bill, or the omnibus election bill,

34
00:05:52,370 --> 00:05:56,850
pertains a slew of changes and proposals as it relates to elections,

35
00:05:57,910 --> 00:06:02,930
typically this is legislation that all the election stakeholders, advocates,

36
00:06:03,550 --> 00:06:07,890
administrators work together and the majority of the bill tends to be

37
00:06:07,890 --> 00:06:12,310
technical cleanup just fixing kind of makes some tweaks there based on lessons

38
00:06:12,310 --> 00:06:16,070
that we learned or just kind of new things that popped up during previous

39
00:06:16,070 --> 00:06:21,750
cycles as well as some you know policy changes that I will kind of touch on here as well.

40
00:06:22,910 --> 00:06:27,210
So the big one I think is extended voting windows.

41
00:06:28,970 --> 00:06:35,390
These move from 22 days to 29 days as to when county clerks may begin mailing out their ballots.

42
00:06:36,070 --> 00:06:41,830
The idea here was getting in line with some other states around the nation that have longer early

43
00:06:41,830 --> 00:06:47,310
the early voting windows as it relates to mail ballots and then also giving voters more

44
00:06:47,310 --> 00:06:52,810
time to receive their ballots, as well as make sure they get it back, get it in the mail

45
00:06:52,810 --> 00:06:59,370
stream if they need to or more time to find a drop off drop it off there. Or if there's any issues

46
00:06:59,370 --> 00:07:04,010
come up, they have more time to work with a local county clerk to get a replacement ballots

47
00:07:04,010 --> 00:07:09,490
or just make sure they have both ample time and opportunities to vote and troubleshoot

48
00:07:09,490 --> 00:07:16,810
would have thing to do. Along with that, there was also a change to open Dropboxes earlier from

49
00:07:16,810 --> 00:07:22,410
15 to 22 days. This is also, you know, to ensure that voters have aren't sitting on their

50
00:07:22,410 --> 00:07:31,670
ballot longer than they need to. Following that, this is a change there that prohibits any candidates

51
00:07:31,670 --> 00:07:38,010
seeking a third term of the presidency from appearing on Colorado ballots. Colorado statute was

52
00:07:38,010 --> 00:07:44,210
somewhat silence on whether federal and some state candidates to certain extent

53
00:07:46,230 --> 00:07:50,170
if they need to meet all the qualifications as athletes out in the constitution.

54
00:07:50,630 --> 00:07:56,070
And so this is almost a cleanup measure or a technical change just to clarify that every

55
00:07:56,070 --> 00:08:00,210
candidate has to meet the obligations that are stated by their governing statute whether that

56
00:08:00,210 --> 00:08:01,190
or federal.

57
00:08:04,110 --> 00:08:13,130
Another one there is kind of just in response to just concerns of changes or quick

58
00:08:13,130 --> 00:08:17,610
changes to federal election law and how it affects state law and how we run our elections

59
00:08:17,610 --> 00:08:21,490
given that we are. How many days out from the election jump?

60
00:08:24,310 --> 00:08:28,030
We're 82 days. 82 days and so there

61
00:08:28,030 --> 00:08:33,330
tends to be a bit of uncertainty about, you know, if there are any changes at federal law or

62
00:08:33,330 --> 00:08:40,850
kind of programmatic things at the federal level, that color will be able to run the elections

63
00:08:40,850 --> 00:08:49,310
as required by Title 1. And so if something comes up or county clerks and election administrators

64
00:08:49,310 --> 00:08:53,030
in the state are not able to need their statutory obligations to be these recent changes,

65
00:08:53,030 --> 00:09:05,590
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.

66
00:09:09,380 --> 00:09:10,380
Moving on.

67
00:09:11,440 --> 00:09:21,260
There's a new provision that requires strict retain of custody requirements for election materials in the event of.

68
00:09:21,260 --> 00:09:27,200
of a court order warrants or anything like that, and just makes it clear that folks know

69
00:09:27,200 --> 00:09:33,320
if they are being requested to hand over sent election materials or election records

70
00:09:33,320 --> 00:09:38,260
or voting equipment, things like that, that there's a clear process that just laid out

71
00:09:39,120 --> 00:09:47,020
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

72
00:09:47,020 --> 00:09:53,500
What records are being requested and where they went and we wanted to make sure that there is a paper trail

73
00:09:53,500 --> 00:09:58,480
So just speak on anything that goes and where it goes as it leads to all types of election documents

74
00:10:00,000 --> 00:10:09,660
Or, the statewide voter database, or the non-fidivist. Yeah, database into the statewide voter registration system by July 1, 2021.

75
00:10:10,380 --> 00:10:15,940
This will have, this will be a lot of work to do, but I know folks have been wanting it for a while.

76
00:10:16,720 --> 00:10:19,340
And we'll make our kind of systems a lot better, and all that's in there.

77
00:10:22,460 --> 00:10:28,240
Change the age eligibility requirements for a student election judge from 16 to 15.

78
00:10:29,340 --> 00:10:34,560
allows voters to request time off in order to vote at any time while VFCs are open.

79
00:10:34,820 --> 00:10:40,420
Instead of as current law, the employers will charge to give someone two hours to vote on election day.

80
00:10:40,600 --> 00:10:47,240
And so this gives votes more ability and kind of more ability to actually use vote when it works for them.

81
00:10:51,280 --> 00:10:57,580
Creates need reporting requirements for counties with one or more VFCs experience in a way time and access of one hour.

82
00:10:58,740 --> 00:11:01,960
privacy person from being selected as a watcher if the person's been

83
00:11:01,960 --> 00:11:06,600
victim of certain election offenses or of committing or conspiracy to commit

84
00:11:06,600 --> 00:11:11,060
certain federal offenses. And lastly, allows an electorate to take printed

85
00:11:11,060 --> 00:11:15,740
or written materials of their choice into a VPSPC as a resource for voting.

86
00:11:27,330 --> 00:11:27,550
Beyond

87
00:11:27,550 --> 00:11:35,310
that, cup more kind of election-related legislation. This one, hospital 26, 10, 23

88
00:11:36,050 --> 00:11:39,230
a political party liability for excess political requirements.

89
00:11:39,430 --> 00:11:45,250
This one in my view was also a bit of a cleanup measure, just clarified that the state party

90
00:11:45,250 --> 00:11:51,390
is responsible and, you know, as to make sure that any request for accessible participation

91
00:11:52,130 --> 00:11:58,870
will be met and it's not a, it's not solely on a volunteer at one of these, you know,

92
00:11:59,130 --> 00:12:02,970
precinct meeting or caucus and it's the analysis on the state party.

93
00:12:05,300 --> 00:12:20,460
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.

94
00:12:20,460 --> 00:12:28,320
That's like the board that they're required to create an independent body similar to that we have for state and federal races.

95
00:12:28,320 --> 00:12:29,460
for Burberry District

96
00:12:32,250 --> 00:12:34,150
and

97
00:12:36,580 --> 00:12:41,180
Hospital 26, 10, 84 voter transparency and ballot measures.

98
00:12:42,200 --> 00:12:47,340
This, there was a similar measure back in, I think, 21, that requires additional required

99
00:12:47,340 --> 00:12:49,980
language for ballot measures to further inform voters.

100
00:12:50,320 --> 00:12:55,900
This is another one like that where part of the Fifth Impact Statement and ballot information

101
00:12:55,900 --> 00:13:01,000
booklet and three four says the initiative measures that require state spending, so ones like

102
00:13:01,000 --> 00:13:03,100
I think, as initiative 350,

103
00:13:05,180 --> 00:13:08,280
and a couple of years back, that's to make sure that the measures

104
00:13:08,280 --> 00:13:14,480
states where the money will be coming from in which top three program areas will be affected by that.

105
00:13:18,300 --> 00:13:20,260
House full 26, 1293,

106
00:13:22,440 --> 00:13:24,940
modernization of requirements for ballot information booklet.

107
00:13:25,860 --> 00:13:29,460
As I mentioned in the note, primarily it's a clean and measure, codifying certain

108
00:13:29,460 --> 00:13:35,820
current practices that LCS does with the blue book and just makes it a bit more modern,

109
00:13:36,020 --> 00:13:42,040
at least the statute. But voters should not see any significant changes to how the blue books

110
00:13:42,040 --> 00:13:44,120
pertains to them and it doesn't look like that.

111
00:13:46,360 --> 00:13:50,040
And House Bill 26, 13, 20, accessible language

112
00:13:50,040 --> 00:13:56,420
set. That should be a delicate title requirements. This one is in response to a lot of folks.

113
00:13:57,280 --> 00:14:03,520
the shared common feeling that ballot titles are confusing to voters and so this largely

114
00:14:03,520 --> 00:14:08,620
encourages title board to use language that is accessible and more widely understood to

115
00:14:08,620 --> 00:14:14,560
someone who is reading that measure at any grade level effectively. Additionally, current

116
00:14:14,560 --> 00:14:22,580
law requires certain language be placed in certain places in the ballot title and this allows

117
00:14:22,580 --> 00:14:29,620
title board to move that around, place it anywhere in the title with the theory being they

118
00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:11,700
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.

119
00:15:13,420 --> 00:15:26,600
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.

120
00:15:27,280 --> 00:15:33,120
stuff like that. And so this is largely a general assembly measure. This does not affect

121
00:15:33,120 --> 00:15:40,240
candidates, the or axis of the ballots. This is strictly enforced, so to speak, by the general

122
00:15:40,240 --> 00:15:40,660
assembly.

123
00:15:44,700 --> 00:15:49,100
And those are the ones I've highlighted here, but I'm happy to take any questions

124
00:15:49,100 --> 00:15:53,460
or kind of open this up if there's any other comments on some of the bills that we discussed.

125
00:15:53,460 --> 00:15:54,200
We've

126
00:16:06,550 --> 00:16:12,890
done a couple of handrails. If you just want to shout out your question, that'd be great.

127
00:16:16,380 --> 00:16:21,000
Hi, I'm a quick question, and the apologies if you covered this earlier.

128
00:16:21,160 --> 00:16:27,060
When do these go into effect? Are they for the general or are they different timelines?

129
00:16:30,500 --> 00:16:33,980
Yeah, so it depends on the specific bill itself.

130
00:16:34,700 --> 00:16:39,080
The big election bill that I covered at the beginning, that has various timelines.

131
00:16:39,080 --> 00:16:44,240
that went initially had a safety clause for the build generally, but certain provisions, such

132
00:16:44,240 --> 00:16:51,640
as the extended mail ballot times, that was that to take effect after the primary election,

133
00:16:52,100 --> 00:16:56,620
because when the bill passed, though, it had been too close for the counties to work with

134
00:16:56,620 --> 00:17:02,700
the vendors, to just make sure they can apply with that. And so that has varying effective dates throughout

135
00:17:02,700 --> 00:17:08,300
the build. And as far as the other ones, I don't remember off top my head, which had a safety

136
00:17:08,300 --> 00:17:14,960
clause or petition clause in that. But if it had a petition clause, everything, everything

137
00:17:14,960 --> 00:17:22,720
with a petition clause went into effect, I think yesterday, two days ago, and so if not

138
00:17:22,720 --> 00:17:29,020
in the bill specific about when it took effect either immediately or some other time in the

139
00:17:29,020 --> 00:17:29,340
future.

140
00:17:33,140 --> 00:17:39,860
And I note that there's a question in the audience. I just heads up that the audience

141
00:17:39,860 --> 00:17:48,640
will have an opportunity to do a two minute address to the commission, but it's not a back and

142
00:17:48,640 --> 00:17:55,920
forth question answer period. So if you'd like to make a comment later, when we open the

143
00:17:55,920 --> 00:18:02,540
mics, just feel free to raise your hand at that time. Any other questions or comments for Alex

144
00:18:02,540 --> 00:18:04,080
among the commissioners

145
00:18:11,570 --> 00:18:13,410
and do not apologize, Christina.

146
00:18:15,690 --> 00:18:32,030
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.

147
00:18:32,850 --> 00:18:38,470
But why don't we switch to my presentation, which is on the 2026 primary election?

148
00:18:38,470 --> 00:18:41,170
Let me get that up,

149
00:19:07,120 --> 00:19:07,640
you know,

150
00:19:11,940 --> 00:19:15,440
hold on just like, you won't, uh,

151
00:19:38,160 --> 00:19:40,240
there we go, that's gonna work.

152
00:20:00,000 --> 00:20:26,640
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.

153
00:20:26,640 --> 00:20:33,680
and so hopefully I've addressed some of the questions, but I always like to talk at the beginning

154
00:20:33,680 --> 00:20:39,560
about voter registration because voter registration at least in a state that has voter registration

155
00:20:39,560 --> 00:20:47,320
is the lifeblood of a successful election. So here are the nuts and bolts of voter registration

156
00:20:47,320 --> 00:20:54,500
in the state of Colorado. We have both electronic and paper ways that you can register to vote,

157
00:20:54,500 --> 00:21:00,580
most of our registrations and updates occur electronically. Our automatic voter registration

158
00:21:00,580 --> 00:21:08,460
has been pretty extraordinarily successful at sort of meeting our voters where they are

159
00:21:08,460 --> 00:21:14,300
and getting registrations and updates through a natural course of your interactions with the

160
00:21:14,300 --> 00:21:24,380
government when you get a driver's license or update that driver's license. So that's what you

161
00:21:24,380 --> 00:21:31,160
a leader on that over half of our voter registrations and updates occur just naturally over

162
00:21:31,160 --> 00:21:37,040
the course of a person's interaction with the government and are not based solely on trying

163
00:21:37,040 --> 00:21:45,300
to do that for an election. However, if you want to make a registration change or you want

164
00:21:45,300 --> 00:21:52,440
to register to vote for the first time, you can use online voter registration and I just wanted

165
00:21:52,440 --> 00:21:57,900
the note that there are two ways to access that, both using your driver's license number,

166
00:21:58,200 --> 00:22:08,480
but also your Social Security number, 98.81% of our voter registration file, our voters have

167
00:22:08,480 --> 00:22:19,380
a DL on file, and then 99.5% essentially of our voter registration files have a Social Security

168
00:22:19,380 --> 00:22:27,680
number on them. So, a very, very high percentage of our population can access that through online

169
00:22:27,680 --> 00:22:34,180
voter registration, access their voter registration file. And that information on the file allows

170
00:22:34,180 --> 00:22:42,400
us to do a very good list maintenance on those files. We also do Section 7, NVRA compliance,

171
00:22:43,320 --> 00:22:48,920
which is registrations while you're receiving government services. And then it's not unusual at

172
00:22:48,920 --> 00:22:56,200
that we will get online voter registration drives, so these are outside groups that are trying

173
00:22:56,200 --> 00:23:01,300
to encourage people to register to vote or update. And then we have paperways that people

174
00:23:01,300 --> 00:23:07,540
can register. I wouldn't note that now over the years this has become less and less of the focus

175
00:23:07,540 --> 00:23:12,660
of our voters were now under 10% of our registrations coming in by paper.

176
00:23:14,990 --> 00:23:16,130
Just to give you some

177
00:23:16,130 --> 00:23:22,690
numbers from this year. This is the new registrations that we're getting through the DMV.

178
00:23:23,570 --> 00:23:30,450
I just want to emphasize the way that that works and you all probably have driver's licenses or

179
00:23:30,450 --> 00:23:46,110
state IDs, so you have had this experience. But when you go and do the DMV to get a driver's license

180
00:23:46,110 --> 00:23:54,550
It's all about identity and you must stand in front of another government official and produce those to get a driver's license

181
00:23:54,550 --> 00:23:59,830
That's why we feel like and I think pretty much every election and professional feels like

182
00:23:59,830 --> 00:24:07,070
That interaction is the best that's sort of the holy grail of getting very good voter registration data

183
00:24:07,850 --> 00:24:12,270
And making sure that we know exactly who we're talking to and

184
00:24:12,270 --> 00:24:18,650
And for us, we are average in around 14,000 new registrations each month, sometimes that number

185
00:24:18,650 --> 00:24:23,070
is higher, especially in the summer, and it's lower in the winter, especially February

186
00:24:23,070 --> 00:24:29,990
with the fewer days, so that this is a trend line that we see across every year.

187
00:24:30,770 --> 00:24:37,430
And when we first started the, like, purely automatic voter registration in 2020, 2020 doesn't

188
00:24:37,430 --> 00:24:39,650
really count because it was such an odd year.

189
00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:12,220
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.

190
00:25:12,660 --> 00:25:24,380
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.

191
00:25:24,380 --> 00:25:28,440
show our voter registration trends over the years.

192
00:25:29,420 --> 00:25:34,260
I always need to do a quick definition of what it is to be an active voter,

193
00:25:34,480 --> 00:25:36,400
and what it is to be an inactive voter,

194
00:25:36,580 --> 00:25:38,540
so an active voter in the state of Colorado,

195
00:25:38,740 --> 00:25:41,900
and frankly, 44 states around the country.

196
00:25:42,900 --> 00:25:48,660
Our voters where we have a good faith belief that the voter lives

197
00:25:48,660 --> 00:25:52,260
at the address that they have on file or resides at that address.

198
00:25:52,260 --> 00:25:57,760
So, those active voter numbers, you can see, have

199
00:25:57,760 --> 00:26:00,960
trended up about a million people over the last decade,

200
00:26:02,520 --> 00:26:05,280
corresponding to the growth and population in the state of Colorado.

201
00:26:05,520 --> 00:26:09,260
And then also Colorado is a comparatively young state,

202
00:26:10,820 --> 00:26:13,340
compared to, especially many states in the north.

203
00:26:13,980 --> 00:26:16,460
And so our population is younger, and we tend to have

204
00:26:16,920 --> 00:26:20,940
more children that become adults.

205
00:26:20,940 --> 00:26:24,780
And so that number is related to that.

206
00:26:24,860 --> 00:26:28,760
An inactive voter is a voter who formerly was an active voter,

207
00:26:29,520 --> 00:26:33,180
but when we sent them a ballot or we sent them some other mailing,

208
00:26:33,780 --> 00:26:36,180
that mailing was rejected as undeliverable.

209
00:26:36,520 --> 00:26:39,200
And that confirmation mailing was sent to confirm

210
00:26:39,740 --> 00:26:42,580
that that person no longer lives at that address,

211
00:26:42,660 --> 00:26:44,260
and that comes back as undeliverable.

212
00:26:44,560 --> 00:26:47,540
Now we know that we have a person who's moved,

213
00:26:47,940 --> 00:26:49,180
and we don't know where they moved.

214
00:26:49,180 --> 00:26:53,300
So we're going to inactivate that voter registration until

215
00:26:53,300 --> 00:26:56,620
such time as we learn where they've moved in the state.

216
00:26:57,020 --> 00:26:59,280
And if we never learn where they've moved,

217
00:26:59,740 --> 00:27:01,820
then we're going to eventually cancel them.

218
00:27:01,840 --> 00:27:04,480
And that's going to happen over the course of two general elections,

219
00:27:04,800 --> 00:27:08,500
which so typically we're talking about four years or thereabouts,

220
00:27:08,740 --> 00:27:11,120
where somebody is in this inactive status.

221
00:27:11,500 --> 00:27:14,240
And then eventually they become a canceled voter.

222
00:27:15,300 --> 00:27:17,880
We also, on this page, have pre-registered voters.

223
00:27:17,880 --> 00:27:24,360
these are registered voters who are below the age of 18. So they are not officially registered,

224
00:27:24,600 --> 00:27:31,760
they are pre-registered. And that number has been pretty steady in the 60,000 or so over the

225
00:27:31,760 --> 00:27:39,000
last several years. But it changed this last year when we moved up to 104,000. And that is because

226
00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:45,740
we added one more year where a person could be registered of a prior to terminating teams. So we added

227
00:27:45,740 --> 00:27:52,400
15-year-olds, you might ask for self, why on earth would we add 15-year-olds? Well, we added 15-year-olds

228
00:27:52,400 --> 00:27:59,360
because there are a lot of people in the state who will get a driver's permit at 15, but then

229
00:27:59,360 --> 00:28:07,300
not have an official DMV transaction until after they're 18. And so we wanted to catch that group of people who

230
00:28:07,300 --> 00:28:13,840
were 15 so that we could have that government interaction and get them registered to vote or at least

231
00:28:13,840 --> 00:28:19,540
in this case pre-register. So that's why that number took that. But we have around 100,000 people

232
00:28:19,540 --> 00:28:28,680
who are pre-registered right now. Just a interesting note that the vast majority of those, as you'll

233
00:28:28,680 --> 00:28:37,040
see with a remainder of the Colorado voter population, are unafiliated, but among those who are

234
00:28:37,040 --> 00:28:41,400
affiliated, slightly more of them are affiliated as Republicans than as Democrats.

235
00:28:42,340 --> 00:28:46,620
So that's a trend line that's somewhat different than what's happening in the state.

236
00:28:48,080 --> 00:28:51,080
This is party registration over that same period of time.

237
00:28:51,520 --> 00:28:53,640
So I literally pulled this from last month.

238
00:28:54,340 --> 00:28:59,140
So we are now over 50% on affiliated in the state of Colorado.

239
00:29:00,040 --> 00:29:04,540
22.5% Republican and 24.8% Democrat.

240
00:29:04,540 --> 00:29:15,560
If you go back 12 years to 2014, we were a plurality Republican state at 37 percent, 32 for Democrats and 29 for unaffiliated.

241
00:29:16,220 --> 00:29:24,040
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.

242
00:29:25,840 --> 00:29:32,320
And then, by the way, the other category is also growing and if you think about it in terms

243
00:29:32,320 --> 00:29:39,820
of its specific increase, it's almost doubled over the last 10 years, people choosing one

244
00:29:39,820 --> 00:29:43,380
of the non-traditional political parties.

245
00:29:44,720 --> 00:29:46,780
All right, let's shift to the primary.

246
00:29:47,740 --> 00:29:55,380
So this is where we started. These were our voter count at the beginning of the election.

247
00:29:56,100 --> 00:29:59,900
We had 1,7,781 Democrats.

248
00:30:00,050 --> 00:30:13,270
Are the turnouts of the 177,000 Democrats, 486,000 of them voted over about 48 percent. Of the Republicans,

249
00:30:14,550 --> 00:30:29,330
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.

250
00:30:29,330 --> 00:30:37,410
around 28%. Of the people who were registered to vote as a libertarian, 10% of them voted,

251
00:30:37,730 --> 00:30:43,410
and of the 30,000 who are registered as unity party members, about 6%.

252
00:30:44,330 --> 00:30:52,110
Now I have to, so this is one of those references I made earlier. In the past one of these meetings,

253
00:30:52,230 --> 00:30:59,050
I was asked, hey, can you show me parties switching during this time? So do we have a lot of

254
00:30:59,050 --> 00:31:04,510
Democrats switching to Republican or Republicans switching to Democrat, you could also have an

255
00:31:04,510 --> 00:31:10,070
unafiliated picking a party which we do occasionally, but you don't have to do that during that period

256
00:31:10,070 --> 00:31:16,830
of time because you'll get both ballots. But this question's come up so I hadn't pulled the information.

257
00:31:18,570 --> 00:31:26,330
You can see here that the left-hand column is what the previous party was, the across column,

258
00:31:26,330 --> 00:31:35,630
left to right column is the new party. So there were about 1,000 new Democrats during this

259
00:31:35,630 --> 00:31:44,350
period, but if you look at the right-hand column, they lost about 789 people. So if you look

260
00:31:44,350 --> 00:31:51,710
at that 1,07 and the 789, there was about a 200-person difference where the Democratic party

261
00:31:51,710 --> 00:31:59,710
added 200 voters. On Affiliated interestingly was 1372, but if you look at the right column,

262
00:31:59,810 --> 00:32:05,330
it's 1370. So there was basically a net wash of on Affiliated people switching back and

263
00:32:05,330 --> 00:32:11,550
forth between having a party designation or not. And then on the Republican side, the Republican

264
00:32:11,550 --> 00:32:21,250
Party gained 505, but lost 702. So that they were down about 200 voters. But you can see that

265
00:32:21,250 --> 00:32:30,590
you go like specifically tap into the given columns. There were 100 Republicans who switched to

266
00:32:30,590 --> 00:32:38,130
the Democratic Party and there were 66 Democrats that switched to the Republican Party. That's

267
00:32:38,130 --> 00:32:43,890
an often a question we get. Turns out there's not a lot of switching that goes on. This is in

268
00:32:43,890 --> 00:32:50,550
the month prior to and during a primary election. So you would think like the prime time when you

269
00:32:50,550 --> 00:32:56,990
see people switching and of course there's a deadline in there but you would think that that would be

270
00:32:56,990 --> 00:33:02,250
when you would see switching and there's really just not a lot of switching. The biggest switches

271
00:33:02,250 --> 00:33:11,290
were the unaffiliated who were switching to both parties but it seems like about a two and a half to

272
00:33:11,290 --> 00:33:20,530
one margin to the Democratic Party. Any questions? I'll stop right there because there's a lot of

273
00:33:20,530 --> 00:33:22,450
any questions about that one.

274
00:33:24,720 --> 00:33:26,180
And we can always come back to it, finally.

275
00:33:28,540 --> 00:33:29,360
All right, we'll just

276
00:33:29,360 --> 00:33:35,980
keep going forward. So the breakdown of unafiliated voters, so of that group of unafiliated voters,

277
00:33:36,100 --> 00:33:45,260
that 580,000, 418,000 of them picked a Democratic ballot, and 164,000 of them picked a Republican

278
00:33:45,260 --> 00:33:53,760
not, so it's about 72 to 28%. And 103 of them picked a unity ballot. You might think

279
00:33:53,760 --> 00:33:57,360
to yourself a way to make it happen to the libertarians, while the libertarians

280
00:33:57,360 --> 00:34:06,380
when they designated themselves for a primary, they closed the right of unafiliated to participate

281
00:34:06,380 --> 00:34:12,160
in their election. So they said, no, we don't want unafiliated to participate in our election,

282
00:34:12,160 --> 00:34:18,460
which as a third party they are permitted to do. So that's what they did. So they did not permit

283
00:34:18,460 --> 00:34:27,940
any Democrats or any unafiliated, unafiliated, to be able to switch out like the Democrat and Republican cards did.

284
00:34:30,430 --> 00:34:36,110
All right, so this is the overall numbers of accepted ballots. I don't know, I lost some graphics there.

285
00:34:36,110 --> 00:34:43,870
This is, you can see that overall we had 535,000 votes for the Republican, a Republican

286
00:34:43,870 --> 00:34:49,790
card, so a Republican ballot, and 904,000 Democratic cards were voted.

287
00:34:51,930 --> 00:34:58,690
I'm going to go through, I have these sort of heat map slides, again, sort of a different

288
00:34:58,690 --> 00:34:59,970
way of viewing some of this.

289
00:35:00,000 --> 00:35:29,820
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,

290
00:35:29,820 --> 00:35:40,370
or three and four. If you look at actual votes cast in that sort of heat map review, Jefferson

291
00:35:40,370 --> 00:35:44,430
County had the highest note, I'm sorry, Denver County had the highest and then followed by

292
00:35:44,430 --> 00:35:52,450
Jefferson County and El Paso County. And again, sort of pretty closely map matches where we have

293
00:35:52,450 --> 00:35:57,870
active voters. Let's look at percentage, though. So this is the accepted ballot percentage

294
00:35:58,690 --> 00:36:05,930
cross the counties for the states. I'll just let you know information that's coming

295
00:36:05,930 --> 00:36:12,070
on a later slide, which is the overall percentage turnout was 36% of active

296
00:36:12,070 --> 00:36:18,410
voters. So anytime you see a county less than 36.5, they were below the average.

297
00:36:19,050 --> 00:36:24,790
Anything above is above the average. We had a couple of counties with really stand out.

298
00:36:24,790 --> 00:36:31,030
Turn out Jackson County's kind of the one that stands out as the darkest on the screen

299
00:36:31,030 --> 00:36:38,310
and then Washington, Kyua, Rio Blanco. I would note for those long-time listeners,

300
00:36:38,670 --> 00:36:45,670
first-time colors, mineral county, almost always wins this race. They almost always have the

301
00:36:45,670 --> 00:36:53,030
highest turnout in mineral minerals down in the southwest kind of cornerish. They are six in this

302
00:36:53,030 --> 00:37:00,730
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.

303
00:37:01,630 --> 00:37:10,210
But there were clearly some very interested voters in many of the counties that were mentioning here.

304
00:37:10,630 --> 00:37:17,770
And turnout was pretty good across much of the metro as well, in some of the more populous counties.

305
00:37:17,770 --> 00:37:22,270
But we did see quite low turnout in Adams County,

306
00:37:22,510 --> 00:37:29,590
Weld County, Morgan County, and that pulled down the state quite a bit.

307
00:37:33,050 --> 00:37:39,490
Let's talk about in-person numbers, so in-person we had about 24,000 people vote in-person.

308
00:37:40,350 --> 00:37:46,070
The largest county in terms of in-person votes was Denver and it wasn't even close.

309
00:37:46,070 --> 00:37:57,070
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.

310
00:37:57,510 --> 00:38:05,630
Again, I can do this by percentage. So this is the percentage turnout of in-person votes cast for that county.

311
00:38:06,470 --> 00:38:15,650
We would typically see around 1.5% stay wide in this election we were 1.7% so slightly higher

312
00:38:15,650 --> 00:38:16,790
than we typically would.

313
00:38:16,810 --> 00:38:23,750
What that means is 98.3% voted a mail ballot that was mailed to them or perhaps they came

314
00:38:23,750 --> 00:38:30,950
in and got it in person but chances are it was mailed to them and then 1.7% voted in person

315
00:38:31,590 --> 00:38:36,650
Denver County was very high this year. I think there was a lot of activism among younger

316
00:38:36,650 --> 00:38:40,830
voters and younger voters tend to be the group that votes in person at the higher

317
00:38:40,830 --> 00:38:44,990
percentage. But you can see there are other counties where there was a pretty high

318
00:38:44,990 --> 00:38:49,190
percentage of in-person voters. Lake County had a very high percentage. I'm gonna

319
00:38:49,190 --> 00:38:55,030
guess why Lake County was a little different than we would typically see. And that

320
00:38:55,030 --> 00:38:59,530
was because they had a very dangerous situation there with a fire that was right

321
00:38:59,530 --> 00:39:06,290
across the ridge from them, and at times during the election cycle was as close to say three to five miles.

322
00:39:07,890 --> 00:39:17,970
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.

323
00:39:19,590 --> 00:39:25,090
That's probably also the case down in San Miguel County, where they also had some buyers.

324
00:40:01,550 --> 00:40:18,570
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?

325
00:40:18,890 --> 00:40:26,990
Again, not necessarily registered Democrats and registered voters because unafiliated could vote one or either of the ballots.

326
00:40:26,990 --> 00:40:31,690
but if you just broke it down in terms of what ballot was cast,

327
00:40:32,870 --> 00:40:35,510
slightly higher percentage of democratic ballots

328
00:40:35,510 --> 00:40:38,670
were cast in person than Republican ballots,

329
00:40:38,730 --> 00:40:40,210
we're casting person.

330
00:40:43,640 --> 00:40:46,360
This is the famous hockey stick slide.

331
00:40:47,060 --> 00:40:49,140
It's not as much a hockey stick this time.

332
00:40:49,180 --> 00:40:50,020
I don't know, I don't know,

333
00:40:50,080 --> 00:40:51,600
I don't think about what that image looks like

334
00:40:51,600 --> 00:40:53,620
and see if I can come up with a new image,

335
00:40:54,060 --> 00:40:55,820
or a new, new framing of it.

336
00:40:55,820 --> 00:41:06,760
But it's we did have a lot of activity comparatively on the Monday and Tuesday of election

337
00:41:06,760 --> 00:41:12,360
week instead of solely on election day, and because of that, you know, we picked up quite

338
00:41:12,360 --> 00:41:19,740
a bit in that Monday prior to election day, but overall, that's the 24,685.

339
00:41:19,740 --> 00:41:27,420
I would just note that there are often discussions and, you know, not in this, you know,

340
00:41:27,560 --> 00:41:33,340
celebratory group here, but among others who are less sophisticated in elections, who believe

341
00:41:33,340 --> 00:41:41,620
that having the same day registration will open us up to potential voter fraud, because

342
00:41:41,620 --> 00:41:47,160
there will be large groups of people who will come in to register for the first time and vote

343
00:41:47,160 --> 00:41:50,360
on using vaporities and so forth.

344
00:41:51,240 --> 00:41:53,340
This number that you're seeing on the screen,

345
00:41:54,300 --> 00:41:56,420
comparatively given different elections

346
00:41:56,420 --> 00:42:00,240
that have different numbers is pretty consistent with what

347
00:42:00,240 --> 00:42:02,700
we see, which is a very low percentage

348
00:42:02,700 --> 00:42:08,720
of our voters coming in to register new during the election.

349
00:42:09,840 --> 00:42:12,120
If they are coming in to do anything to their file,

350
00:42:12,240 --> 00:42:13,820
they're updating, and then they're voting.

351
00:42:14,420 --> 00:42:21,440
But most people who come and go to a VSPC on election day or before, they are just there

352
00:42:21,440 --> 00:42:22,120
to vote in person.

353
00:42:22,360 --> 00:42:27,020
Because I wanted to vote in person, and that our state law allows that.

354
00:42:27,520 --> 00:42:34,800
So in this particular election, we had 458 people registered to vote for the first time during

355
00:42:34,800 --> 00:42:40,360
the election during the active time of early voting in election day, and around 5,000 people

356
00:42:40,360 --> 00:42:45,140
made an update to their record, that's usually where they come in and they say,

357
00:42:45,200 --> 00:42:50,020
hey, what happened? I didn't get my mail ballot and they looked them up and they say, well,

358
00:42:50,220 --> 00:42:55,500
what's your address and the person says, I live at 202 L Street and they say, well, we have you

359
00:42:55,500 --> 00:43:00,900
at 101 Main Street. Ah, I moved a couple months ago. Ah, that's why you didn't get your ballot.

360
00:43:01,200 --> 00:43:05,960
Let's get you changed so we'll get you back. So that's usually the way that that works. That's

361
00:43:05,960 --> 00:43:12,080
those 5,000 come from. And then around 20,000 people just wanted to vote in person. And they

362
00:43:12,080 --> 00:43:19,600
received a ballot, they received a ballot of correct address, but they just chose to go in and vote

363
00:43:19,600 --> 00:43:22,900
at their local closest via SPC.

364
00:43:24,920 --> 00:43:27,940
All right, so let's talk about cures for a second. This is another

365
00:43:27,940 --> 00:43:34,220
thing that you have often asked me about, and I've been underwhelming in my response, so I wanted

366
00:43:34,220 --> 00:43:35,520
to give you some more statistics.

367
00:43:37,380 --> 00:43:41,980
So we had statewide about 15,500 ballots

368
00:43:41,980 --> 00:43:43,520
that could have been cured.

369
00:43:44,300 --> 00:43:46,680
So we reject for various reasons.

370
00:43:47,220 --> 00:43:50,120
The majority of the rejection reasons are curable.

371
00:43:50,520 --> 00:43:54,060
That means somebody's signature on the back of that envelope

372
00:43:54,060 --> 00:43:57,120
doesn't match closely enough with the signature we have

373
00:43:57,120 --> 00:43:59,160
on file and so we have to reject it.

374
00:43:59,540 --> 00:44:01,880
Or somebody's signature line is blank

375
00:44:01,880 --> 00:44:03,140
on the back of that ballot.

376
00:44:03,140 --> 00:44:12,140
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

377
00:44:12,140 --> 00:44:19,060
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

378
00:44:19,060 --> 00:44:25,780
Now they have to produce a copy of their ID. That's a pretty labor intensive process and a lot of those get rejected

379
00:44:26,820 --> 00:44:32,280
Because you know doing a photocopy of an ID is kind of painful for that reason

380
00:44:32,280 --> 00:44:37,260
those are often rejected. We have to go back to them again and ask for another ID. That's another

381
00:44:37,260 --> 00:44:45,520
curable option. So those three are the typical curable amounts. You can see that we had around 2300

382
00:44:46,080 --> 00:44:53,920
in Al Paso County that could have been cured. We had around 1700 in Denver that could have been

383
00:44:53,920 --> 00:44:59,960
and a rapoh about 1400 and so forth. So these are all in the...

384
00:45:00,000 --> 00:45:14,920
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.

385
00:45:15,540 --> 00:45:21,940
But let me give you the percentage cure for the counties that have cures.

386
00:45:22,900 --> 00:45:41,180
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.

387
00:45:41,240 --> 00:45:46,960
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.

388
00:45:48,120 --> 00:45:53,340
Some of the counties that are standouts here, again counties with very small populations

389
00:45:53,340 --> 00:45:56,800
all they have to have is a couple of people cure and their numbers are very high.

390
00:45:57,520 --> 00:46:04,400
But in the Metro, El Paso County was slightly below the average, Denver again also slightly

391
00:46:04,400 --> 00:46:05,260
below the average.

392
00:46:05,400 --> 00:46:10,760
But then we had some that were above the average, like Jefferson County, Mason County was

393
00:46:10,760 --> 00:46:12,020
slightly above the average.

394
00:46:12,600 --> 00:46:22,820
So, we don't really have a good handle on what's the driving force of cures, other than close races.

395
00:46:23,660 --> 00:46:26,000
And we didn't really have a lot of close races this time.

396
00:46:27,700 --> 00:46:30,700
So, we have no idea why some of this is the way it is.

397
00:46:31,000 --> 00:46:35,060
But we just make the cure options available to people so that they can do.

398
00:46:36,720 --> 00:47:02,520
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.

399
00:47:02,520 --> 00:47:08,860
It was a person who was not registered, could not register, but insisted on voting, so they

400
00:47:08,860 --> 00:47:12,640
were issued a provisional ballot that was merely rejected, even though they could

401
00:47:12,640 --> 00:47:14,620
actually fill out the form.

402
00:47:16,440 --> 00:47:18,140
Why would we issue a provisional ballot?

403
00:47:18,400 --> 00:47:25,120
Lots of these are, I'm in my RV, I'm driving across the country, I'm in Colorado today.

404
00:47:25,520 --> 00:47:28,200
Hey, it's election day, I should go vote.

405
00:47:28,200 --> 00:47:34,320
Well, you're not a resident of Colorado, and you have no basis to vote in the Colorado election,

406
00:47:34,700 --> 00:47:39,320
but if you want to insist and fill out the form, you can do that. We'll just reject your ballot.

407
00:47:40,020 --> 00:47:48,900
So that's a lot of it. Only the small category of, I forgot my ID when I came in the vote in person,

408
00:47:49,780 --> 00:47:54,820
I'm going to do a provisional, and then I'm going to provide an ID later, are the ones that are accepted.

409
00:47:58,370 --> 00:48:07,170
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.

410
00:48:07,470 --> 00:48:13,250
In this election, 59 of our counties unanimously approved their Canvas report.

411
00:48:14,010 --> 00:48:18,650
Five counties did not get a unanimous sign off on the Canvas report.

412
00:48:19,290 --> 00:48:23,430
Those counties are the many of the metro gangs,

413
00:48:24,410 --> 00:48:27,810
Harapaho Boulder, Douglas, El Paso, and Jefferson.

414
00:48:29,070 --> 00:48:33,510
In each of those cases, a Republican representative to the canvas board

415
00:48:33,510 --> 00:48:38,230
with help there approval, so they all pass to one, except for Douglas.

416
00:48:38,730 --> 00:48:44,950
Douglas, I believe, is the only county in the state that has more than three members of a canvas board.

417
00:48:45,210 --> 00:48:48,630
They have a five person canvas board, so they have two Democrats, two Republicans,

418
00:48:48,630 --> 00:48:55,750
comes in the county clerk. And in Douglas County, one of the Republican Canvas Board members

419
00:48:55,750 --> 00:49:00,830
signed the Canvas, but the other one did not. So they had a 401 as opposed to these two ones

420
00:49:00,830 --> 00:49:18,610
that I mentioned above. The five counties not signing, it's become kind of typical. This is not

421
00:49:18,610 --> 00:49:22,450
in each given election, where the Canvas Board doesn't sign off.

422
00:49:23,890 --> 00:49:26,930
They often will say, we're going to write a minority report.

423
00:50:00,050 --> 00:50:06,030
Why they're choosing to not sign up on the campus.

424
00:50:07,910 --> 00:50:09,250
All right, so ballot tracks.

425
00:50:09,910 --> 00:50:16,470
Ballet tracks continues to be a pretty extraordinarily successful program that we rolled out during the 2020 cycle.

426
00:50:17,670 --> 00:50:28,790
During, again, to go back, remember we have about 4 million active registered voters, about 2.2 million of them received ballot tracks notices.

427
00:50:31,090 --> 00:50:35,850
The contact method, I have a better slide on contact methods, so I'll hold that.

428
00:50:36,250 --> 00:50:41,630
You can see it's slightly weighted toward democratic and, of course, not affiliated voters,

429
00:50:42,550 --> 00:50:46,610
but as a percentage, slightly weighted toward democratic voters.

430
00:50:48,030 --> 00:50:50,310
But for the most part, it's pretty much a wash.

431
00:50:50,310 --> 00:51:03,630
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.

432
00:51:04,470 --> 00:51:10,850
And then, said to the county, year after year, year is our lowest percentage ballot track use.

433
00:51:11,690 --> 00:51:17,490
Honestly, don't, no idea what's happening in Central County. I should have endeavored to find that out.

434
00:51:18,410 --> 00:51:30,610
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.

435
00:51:31,650 --> 00:51:38,690
But 250,000 or so are getting their notices by a text message and another 25,000 are getting voices.

436
00:51:39,290 --> 00:51:46,650
So can I just tell you what that means? What that means is that 250,000 people went on to the website

437
00:51:46,650 --> 00:51:53,490
and said, I don't want to get an email, I want to get a text. So just that sort of gives

438
00:51:53,490 --> 00:51:58,890
credence to the idea that they're pretty engaged populists because they're not just passively

439
00:51:58,890 --> 00:52:03,430
receiving this information. They're actually going and saying, no, I want it this way or I want

440
00:52:03,430 --> 00:52:12,670
it these various ways. And the total number does not match up because the many people are receiving

441
00:52:12,670 --> 00:52:19,830
their notices and multiple ways, like, for instance, me. I receive all three of us. And yes,

442
00:52:19,890 --> 00:52:26,030
it's very annoying. But that's okay. I just want to make sure it all works. And, you know,

443
00:52:26,030 --> 00:52:32,610
it's part of the gate. So, so I'll get all of these notifications. I know many other people are

444
00:52:32,610 --> 00:52:38,350
like that too, especially the staff and the elections division. They often we are the ones

445
00:52:38,350 --> 00:52:39,970
that are receiving the multiple notifications.

446
00:52:41,610 --> 00:52:41,990
All right.

447
00:52:42,670 --> 00:52:44,310
While I have your wrapped attention,

448
00:52:44,790 --> 00:52:47,770
I will do a little plug for Colorado

449
00:52:47,770 --> 00:52:49,390
and the big team of things.

450
00:52:50,450 --> 00:52:52,670
This is Colorado's motor registration rate,

451
00:52:52,890 --> 00:52:59,010
compared to the country based on the 2024 general election data.

452
00:52:59,710 --> 00:53:02,530
I've done a UR here pointer.

453
00:53:02,530 --> 00:53:11,490
We are in third on the list of highest percentage registered of any U.S. states.

454
00:53:12,370 --> 00:53:16,690
The two above us are the district of Columbia.

455
00:53:17,210 --> 00:53:19,090
They don't even count. They're not a state.

456
00:53:20,090 --> 00:53:24,010
So it's actually where actually in second place among the states.

457
00:53:24,350 --> 00:53:26,850
The state immediately ahead of us is Maryland.

458
00:53:27,750 --> 00:53:31,770
and Maryland is always a very high percentage in this,

459
00:53:31,850 --> 00:53:34,010
so we're just a little bit behind them,

460
00:53:34,170 --> 00:53:36,110
but we will endeavor to catch them.

461
00:53:37,730 --> 00:53:39,670
This is, I know this is a very busy slide,

462
00:53:39,930 --> 00:53:42,050
but the most of it's up in this blue.

463
00:53:43,050 --> 00:53:45,770
This is our voter registration over the years,

464
00:53:45,890 --> 00:53:47,090
going back to 2016,

465
00:53:47,570 --> 00:53:50,370
and then our turnout percentage among active voters

466
00:53:50,370 --> 00:53:52,630
during those same years.

467
00:53:53,750 --> 00:53:55,650
Or I'm sorry among eligible voters,

468
00:53:55,650 --> 00:54:00,470
during that same period of time. So you can see we've been steadily in the 92

469
00:54:00,470 --> 00:54:09,010
estranged of registered voters among eligible and then we are in presidential years voting

470
00:54:09,010 --> 00:54:17,790
that around 72, 74, 76% and then the congressional years were in the say 60% range.

471
00:54:18,450 --> 00:54:24,250
So based solely on these statistics I would expect this fall that we would have about 60% turn out

472
00:54:24,250 --> 00:54:27,930
for this general election in 82 days.

473
00:54:29,450 --> 00:54:30,810
Let's see, I think I have two more.

474
00:54:31,650 --> 00:54:35,650
This is Colorado compared to the average national turnout.

475
00:54:36,530 --> 00:54:40,310
Again, of eligible voters, if you go back to 2000,

476
00:54:40,570 --> 00:54:43,410
we were basically a run of the middle of the pack state.

477
00:54:44,070 --> 00:54:47,670
But over time, we have separated from the rest of the country

478
00:54:47,670 --> 00:54:49,590
or at least on average the rest of the country.

479
00:54:50,070 --> 00:54:53,510
And we are not consistently about 10% higher turnout

480
00:54:53,510 --> 00:54:59,210
in the rest of the country, in both sets of elections, both presidential and congressional elections.

481
00:55:00,000 --> 00:55:29,980
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.

482
00:55:30,000 --> 00:55:34,460
but also providing people of the great opportunity to register and to get their ballots.

483
00:55:35,620 --> 00:55:41,360
And then we're trying to do our very best to count those ballots which are fairly

484
00:55:42,820 --> 00:55:52,000
and accurately cast. And then the last thing I'll put you in relation to the rest of the country.

485
00:55:53,100 --> 00:55:59,400
So these are the states that typically are top five, top six, top 10 states in terms of turnout.

486
00:56:00,140 --> 00:56:08,340
In 2000 Colorado again, not a great state, but since then we've done a lot to try to make

487
00:56:08,340 --> 00:56:15,340
ourselves more attractive state for people to register into vote and over time we've gotten

488
00:56:15,340 --> 00:56:21,220
to be one of the really high performing states and for a couple of cycles we were right behind

489
00:56:21,220 --> 00:56:21,740
Minnesota.

490
00:56:23,140 --> 00:56:29,880
But we're now back down to about third or fourth and I'll just note that there are various

491
00:56:29,880 --> 00:56:35,040
you can calculate this. I've seen other ones which say that we're six. I don't like those. I

492
00:56:35,040 --> 00:56:40,860
like the ones where we are fourth. Occasionally, though, we are better in those other ones. That's

493
00:56:40,860 --> 00:56:47,920
when I like those. But for the most part, we are, by one measure, this is one particular measure,

494
00:56:48,300 --> 00:56:56,500
we're at top five state in turnout over the last decade. All right, I think that's me. Yes,

495
00:56:57,140 --> 00:57:09,220
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

496
00:57:17,480 --> 00:57:20,240
or perhaps it was such a brilliant presentation.

497
00:57:21,440 --> 00:57:23,480
all questions were answered.

498
00:57:30,910 --> 00:57:36,590
Glad to know you're all fine with it. Alright, so that was

499
00:57:36,590 --> 00:57:44,490
me. We also have on the agenda Neil McBernett who's going to tell us about some of the

500
00:57:44,490 --> 00:57:51,710
work that he's been doing. I know Matt Creme also had, he was, Matt was going to do the intro

501
00:57:51,710 --> 00:57:54,810
to Neil. So let me hand it to Matt so you can

502
00:57:54,810 --> 00:57:57,150
enjoy me. Sure. Thanks, Judd. And get out of

503
00:57:57,150 --> 00:58:00,370
noon, everybody. It's good to see you all. You know,

504
00:58:00,410 --> 00:58:02,550
we just wanted to provide a brief update on something

505
00:58:02,550 --> 00:58:07,490
that we have been working on. It's been 10 years

506
00:58:07,490 --> 00:58:09,870
since Colorado was the first state to do a statewide

507
00:58:09,870 --> 00:58:12,490
risk limiting audit. And we thought that this was a

508
00:58:12,490 --> 00:58:15,710
good time to take a look at that process. I think most

509
00:58:15,710 --> 00:58:18,110
experts would agree. I mean, including Philip

510
00:58:18,550 --> 00:58:19,890
Starcoath, you know, who's the creative

511
00:58:19,890 --> 00:58:25,130
of all the states that are doing this, Colorado does it the best, however, that doesn't mean that

512
00:58:25,130 --> 00:58:30,890
there isn't room for improvement and that we can't push to get better and provide better data

513
00:58:30,890 --> 00:58:35,650
and hopefully better confidence to voters that our elections are above board and honest.

514
00:58:36,090 --> 00:58:42,590
So we've convened a small working group that includes Judd and others from the Secretary of State's office.

515
00:58:43,250 --> 00:58:47,930
There are few counties representative of different county sizes and regions involved.

516
00:58:47,930 --> 00:58:52,270
And we have elections, stakeholders, like Neil Nick Burnett, and Philip Upsdark, who are also

517
00:58:52,270 --> 00:58:56,630
part of these conversations, where we're really diving down into what our risk limiting

518
00:58:56,630 --> 00:59:01,950
audit process looks like what was the original design of the risk limiting audit, and then

519
00:59:01,950 --> 00:59:07,470
how we can update it and prove our process here, and there's some low-hanging fruit that

520
00:59:07,470 --> 00:59:11,470
we're trying to tackle, and then there's some deeper conversations.

521
00:59:11,990 --> 00:59:17,330
There are things that are pretty easy to identify, like who picks the races, it's not

522
00:59:17,330 --> 00:59:22,550
best practice to have the racist chosen by somebody is there a random way that we can get to

523
00:59:22,550 --> 00:59:28,790
selecting a racist. What can we do to publish and get a better sense of confidence about the

524
00:59:28,790 --> 00:59:33,990
non-targeted races in an RLA? And is there a way where with all of the ballots that we can pull to,

525
00:59:34,130 --> 00:59:41,510
we can get to relatively the same risk limit for all of those contests there? So those are just a

526
00:59:41,510 --> 00:59:46,290
couple of different things, you know, how can we validate this as their way that we can provide

527
00:59:46,290 --> 00:59:54,290
Outside validation right now, we have our corollatool where our audit boards enter in the selections from the

528
00:59:54,290 --> 00:59:57,610
from the voters and that's compared to the CAS vote record.

529
00:59:57,790 --> 00:59:59,970
But if there's something else that we can do to

530
01:00:26,240 --> 01:00:29,900
We're also excited about the work that Neil and his

531
01:00:29,900 --> 01:00:36,600
doing. So Neil, a lot of time it over to user. Well, thank you. And really starting off with

532
01:00:36,600 --> 01:00:44,600
a big thanks to Matt for leading so many important innovations in Colorado. Matt's team did the

533
01:00:44,600 --> 01:00:54,120
first when he was county clerk did the first ballot level risk limiting on it at scale that we've seen

534
01:00:54,120 --> 01:00:58,020
anywhere and continues to push the envelope there.

535
01:00:59,700 --> 01:01:04,860
So I really appreciate the ability to work in Colorado.

536
01:01:05,360 --> 01:01:11,180
I think Colorado supports what we call evidence-based elections better than any other

537
01:01:11,180 --> 01:01:14,420
state that I'm aware of and I try to follow lots of the states.

538
01:01:15,720 --> 01:01:19,800
And that's because of folks like Matt and the Clarks Association,

539
01:01:19,800 --> 01:01:27,700
and clerks like Tiffany Lee in La Plata County, Carly Coppice, and Welc County, Kevin

540
01:01:27,700 --> 01:01:35,840
Stratch and Morgan County, really this year moving the ball forward with some pilot improvements

541
01:01:35,840 --> 01:01:42,720
to the audit, and also to Lori Stevens and Mike Grayson, John Karen for being great colleagues

542
01:01:42,720 --> 01:01:48,920
with me in trying to push this process forward. And the Secretary of State's office has been doing

543
01:01:48,920 --> 01:01:57,920
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.

544
01:01:58,740 --> 01:02:16,900
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.

545
01:02:16,900 --> 01:02:27,520
And I just want to start off framing this in terms of what the problem is, there are, you

546
01:02:27,520 --> 01:02:31,020
all know that you vote on dozens of contests in many elections.

547
01:02:32,080 --> 01:02:36,260
And we think all of those contests to sort of auditing.

548
01:02:36,300 --> 01:02:42,460
Most places around the country are only auditing a couple of contests in each election.

549
01:02:42,460 --> 01:02:50,800
and a local bond issue can make a great deal of difference to people's tax rates, to people's

550
01:02:50,800 --> 01:03:00,500
representation locally. So in Colorado we got gather data on all the contests and while we officially

551
01:03:01,340 --> 01:03:09,540
target a small number typically the data that we gather really allows us to say a lot more about what's

552
01:03:10,820 --> 01:03:19,120
And that's even more true these days with prediction markets and people are actually placing bets on obscure aspects of elections.

553
01:03:19,620 --> 01:03:38,900
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.

554
01:03:39,540 --> 01:03:48,400
In the last primary, the clerks that I mentioned were super in collaborating with our work

555
01:03:50,480 --> 01:03:57,780
to allow the data, not only the data on the manifests, which has been published in the audit

556
01:03:57,780 --> 01:04:06,040
center for many years to be verified and for the random selection to be verified, but to actually

557
01:04:06,040 --> 01:04:15,620
be able to personally verify that the audit interpretation of the ballots that are selected

558
01:04:15,620 --> 01:04:21,660
matches how the voting system recorded it. So let me step back a little bit to how

559
01:04:21,660 --> 01:04:27,520
it's actually worked for those that don't follow the details. In Colorado unlike most states,

560
01:04:27,520 --> 01:04:32,580
we actually publish, we actually obtained data

561
01:04:33,240 --> 01:04:36,000
on every individual ballot and how it was marked.

562
01:05:00,000 --> 01:05:08,260
Compares, that's the cast voter record, is the systems interpretation of every mark for every contest that the voter voted in.

563
01:05:08,380 --> 01:05:17,220
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.

564
01:05:18,520 --> 01:05:29,720
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.

565
01:05:30,000 --> 01:05:40,200
to do the comparison and make sure that the ballots were recorded the way that they're actually interpreted

566
01:05:40,960 --> 01:05:47,180
and to deal with the very rare discrepancy that happened. So I think we had a total of just 16

567
01:05:48,060 --> 01:05:53,060
cases where they picked the wrong ballot by mistake and didn't notice and so on and there was a

568
01:05:53,060 --> 01:06:00,120
very small discrepancy across thousands of actual vote comparisons.

569
01:06:05,500 --> 01:06:11,920
So we gather all that data and we establish the outcome of the audit.

570
01:06:12,280 --> 01:06:17,160
And this year we had volunteers from places like the League of Women Voters,

571
01:06:17,160 --> 01:06:23,780
sitting during the audit and listening and comparing it with their own copy of that

572
01:06:23,780 --> 01:06:31,660
cast-foot record, properly anonymized cast-foot record, that would let them confirm for themselves,

573
01:06:31,780 --> 01:06:39,180
not trust another piece of software how that work. Even more exciting, some people are a little

574
01:06:39,180 --> 01:06:44,040
mystified by how the random selection works. They know that we roll some dice and pick some ballots

575
01:06:44,040 --> 01:06:49,000
based on that, but it's a little mysterious how that happened. So this time in those counties,

576
01:06:49,240 --> 01:06:56,500
we actually took Canvas board members and audit board members and observers and said,

577
01:06:56,800 --> 01:07:03,380
you know, go and pick a ballot point at a ballot. We don't have observers touching ballots,

578
01:07:03,800 --> 01:07:10,040
but you know, identify a ballot in a box, a paper ballot in a box, pull it out and let's see if

579
01:07:12,260 --> 01:07:15,520
that marks on the ballot match what we have in our

580
01:07:15,520 --> 01:07:19,400
cash vote record and those all matched perfectly.

581
01:07:21,000 --> 01:07:26,120
And similarly to look at some ballots that people thought might have been a little,

582
01:07:26,120 --> 01:07:35,160
they might be surprised at the combination of votes that people, you know, choices that people made

583
01:07:35,160 --> 01:07:39,900
in the election then again, we could select from the cash vote record and go and find

584
01:07:39,900 --> 01:07:45,000
the paper valet and again, you know, it feels in the moment almost like taking a rabbit out of the hat.

585
01:07:45,180 --> 01:07:51,280
It's like, yep, that's exactly, we found a piece of paper that matches exactly what the Caspo record said.

586
01:07:52,560 --> 01:08:04,120
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.

587
01:08:04,120 --> 01:08:12,980
and we look forward to learning some of the lessons that we had and allow that process to improve

588
01:08:12,980 --> 01:08:15,120
and modernize how we're doing things.

589
01:08:17,380 --> 01:08:23,180
I'll briefly note, I'm going to have some comments, some slides to share at some point

590
01:08:23,180 --> 01:08:29,400
and I'll have them ready right now, but the election assistance commission at the national level has an

591
01:08:29,400 --> 01:08:35,160
an audit standards process, and there were a lot of comments by people across the country.

592
01:08:36,920 --> 01:08:42,960
And I find them very interesting. I find them relevant to Colorado. There's a lot of interest

593
01:08:42,960 --> 01:08:48,360
in exactly the sort of thing that we're doing, which is moving towards more independence,

594
01:08:48,620 --> 01:08:55,200
and how the audit happens, and more ability for the results to be clear.

595
01:08:55,200 --> 01:09:01,920
And then kind of in another vein, I'm very excited to see that the Longmont Council, I'm

596
01:09:01,920 --> 01:09:07,460
going to leave a women voter's representative to this commission and delighted that the

597
01:09:07,460 --> 01:09:12,980
Longmont City Council is moving forward on a form of ranked choice voting.

598
01:09:13,660 --> 01:09:20,340
They've put a measure on the ballot to adopt, not just the kind that most people are familiar

599
01:09:20,340 --> 01:09:27,360
with that we've used in Boulder, but a proportional representation form of right choice voting

600
01:09:27,360 --> 01:09:35,420
called single transferable vote. And if the voters approve it, that will go to be used in

601
01:09:35,420 --> 01:09:41,480
2029 elections. And so one thing that I just want to highlight, even though it's several years

602
01:10:00,000 --> 01:10:07,340
A particular voting method to be supported. It is already, it works in the software that we use in all the relevant

603
01:10:07,340 --> 01:10:15,000
counties, but we have to make sure that everything is properly certified and tested and that

604
01:10:15,000 --> 01:10:20,340
the election officials are prepared to support the voters in moving to this highly improved

605
01:10:20,340 --> 01:10:28,760
voting method. So I just want to make people aware of that and please let us know if there's anything

606
01:10:28,760 --> 01:10:33,680
that needs to happen on a certain timeline to make that happen,

607
01:10:36,100 --> 01:10:38,300
and we also have some top

608
01:10:38,300 --> 01:10:44,100
scholars in the world, including folks that I hope will be able to comment later in this

609
01:10:44,100 --> 01:10:54,480
meeting on how to audit this enhanced voting method in a way that continues to give us confidence

610
01:10:54,480 --> 01:10:55,440
and the results.

611
01:10:58,420 --> 01:11:04,560
I'll also briefly note that the League of Women Voters has been alarmed

612
01:11:04,560 --> 01:11:15,260
at the bill that was passed, HB25, 13, 15, that turned the general election into a closed primary

613
01:11:15,260 --> 01:11:23,440
election. The actual final decision in some elections, vacancy elections is being made during

614
01:11:23,440 --> 01:11:31,540
general election which is only in which only people of certain parties can vote and that is

615
01:11:31,540 --> 01:11:38,900
in violation of the US Constitution and the Colorado Constitution and so we follow lawsuit a

616
01:11:38,900 --> 01:11:48,040
couple months ago and I just want to again bring that to people's attention and ask for support

617
01:11:48,040 --> 01:11:52,180
to make sure that everybody can vote

618
01:11:52,180 --> 01:11:53,960
in the elections that matter to them.

619
01:11:56,380 --> 01:12:02,560
I'm also going to bring up a concern that I heard

620
01:12:02,560 --> 01:12:04,080
and I don't fully understand.

621
01:12:04,340 --> 01:12:05,820
So if we give me if I get something wrong,

622
01:12:07,020 --> 01:12:09,620
but special district voter list maintenance.

623
01:12:11,540 --> 01:12:15,000
When we think about the impact of small local elections

624
01:12:15,000 --> 01:12:16,820
on people, a special district,

625
01:12:16,820 --> 01:12:23,960
that's something like a metro district or a water district, a sewer district can have huge tax

626
01:12:23,960 --> 01:12:29,220
implications for voters in the district. Then of course huge benefits, you know, constructing

627
01:12:29,220 --> 01:12:35,540
roads and building sewer systems and fixing things. But there's been controversy at various

628
01:12:35,540 --> 01:12:42,720
times about how they structured our bonds and interest rates and concern for the need for the

629
01:12:42,720 --> 01:12:47,240
people who are being taxed to have input on how all that is happening.

630
01:12:48,200 --> 01:12:57,400
And this is particularly challenging because tax districts are the information you need to

631
01:12:57,400 --> 01:13:05,460
determine who can vote is part of the assessor's records because a property owner is eligible

632
01:13:05,460 --> 01:13:12,120
to vote about their tax rates, even if they are a local resident, so they might not be in the voter

633
01:13:12,120 --> 01:13:17,080
or they might live in another state, but they can still vote.

634
01:13:17,500 --> 01:13:20,360
And matching these records up turns out to be really hard.

635
01:13:20,460 --> 01:13:24,420
So I just want to put in a plug for people to pay attention

636
01:13:24,420 --> 01:13:28,820
to how this happens and some of the designated election officials

637
01:13:28,820 --> 01:13:34,880
for the special districts have some...

638
01:13:34,880 --> 01:13:37,340
I don't necessarily have the experience needed.

639
01:13:37,340 --> 01:13:45,340
it can be very complicated to get to match the people with how to contact them and how to

640
01:13:45,340 --> 01:13:51,900
send them their ballots. So I just wanted to flag that for people that want to dive into that.

641
01:13:53,340 --> 01:13:57,400
I think that's what I had on my list. Appreciate your time.

642
01:13:58,240 --> 01:14:02,040
All right, Neil. Thank you. Anybody have any questions for me?

643
01:14:05,340 --> 01:14:16,480
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.

644
01:14:16,940 --> 01:14:23,480
And so the way the law is written, the counties are just have to accept the list that they're given.

645
01:14:24,700 --> 01:14:28,700
I'm sure Mount will have some ideas about how to fix that.

646
01:14:29,320 --> 01:14:32,780
Yeah, I mean, some of this might require legislative fixes.

647
01:14:33,000 --> 01:14:37,140
I know the legislature was trying to make sure that everybody, for sure,

648
01:14:38,520 --> 01:14:41,180
that it was designated to get a ballot and would get one,

649
01:14:42,380 --> 01:14:44,860
but they're making mistakes in both directions, apparently.

650
01:14:46,600 --> 01:14:54,120
So, some way to make sure that these databases can actually be matched up properly.

651
01:14:55,200 --> 01:14:57,120
Makes sense. Again, I'm not sure.

652
01:14:57,640 --> 01:14:59,860
Things are always more complicated than I'd like.

653
01:15:05,260 --> 01:15:23,600
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.

654
01:15:24,640 --> 01:15:31,780
you could talk about legislative initiatives you could talk about anything you want to. So any of the

655
01:15:31,780 --> 01:15:39,740
commissioners if you want to pipe up now you can and then we'll do an open mic with those

656
01:15:39,740 --> 01:15:40,880
who are in the audience.

657
01:15:48,590 --> 01:15:49,530
Seeing anything.

658
01:15:53,350 --> 01:15:57,330
Well, what I'm going to leave that there then and I am going to

659
01:15:57,330 --> 01:15:59,470
on my colleague, Cheryl,

660
01:16:01,690 --> 01:16:08,990
could you monitor the audience to see if anybody would like to make any comments?

661
01:16:10,270 --> 01:16:18,610
I would be happy to, if there is anybody in the attendance that has called in or is in the public.

662
01:16:18,970 --> 01:16:23,930
If you would like to provide comment, please raise your hand and we will call on you as your hands come up.

663
01:16:24,390 --> 01:16:25,230
All

664
01:16:31,150 --> 01:16:37,450
right, okay. Yep. All right. So we'll call on Jason Bertolachie first. I'm going to go ahead and unmute you.

665
01:16:40,950 --> 01:16:47,370
Hey Jason. Hey Jeff. Hey Jeff. No comment, but I just had a quick question on the plain language.

666
01:16:47,530 --> 01:17:00,990
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

667
01:17:04,930 --> 01:17:10,390
I will defer to Alex or John who member once to chime in here.

668
01:17:10,630 --> 01:17:13,630
I would note though that we literally are promulgating rules today.

669
01:17:13,810 --> 01:17:16,870
I mean, they're notists on the website, so.

670
01:17:17,450 --> 01:17:18,470
I can chime in on that one.

671
01:17:18,710 --> 01:17:21,110
I think, and Alex, feel free to chime in, too.

672
01:17:21,430 --> 01:17:25,930
I don't believe title board has its own set of rulemaking authority, typically what title board

673
01:17:25,930 --> 01:17:30,050
does is work through their own guidance and work with their own legal counsel, so I think

674
01:17:30,050 --> 01:17:34,410
understanding what that bill is that they're going to look at the legislation and then work

675
01:17:34,410 --> 01:17:39,150
with their council through the Attorney General's Office and work because it's a three agency

676
01:17:39,150 --> 01:17:44,090
operation right between the legislature or office in the Attorney General's Office. So I don't think

677
01:17:44,090 --> 01:17:50,110
there's formal rule making authority nor is my recollection that bill directs them to

678
01:17:50,110 --> 01:17:54,810
promulgate rules, but the statute will provide the guidance that then they will take and then

679
01:17:54,810 --> 01:17:59,390
work amongst themselves and with their council and work to figure out how that forms into the

680
01:17:59,390 --> 01:18:01,330
titles that they set at Title Board.

681
01:18:01,750 --> 01:18:04,350
So I think that's my understanding, Alex Judd,

682
01:18:04,350 --> 01:18:06,590
Chen, and if you have a different understanding,

683
01:18:06,670 --> 01:18:09,810
but I'm pretty sure that's the general approach

684
01:18:09,810 --> 01:18:11,890
that that is likely to happen.

685
01:18:13,310 --> 01:18:16,570
Yeah, I'm hearing from Theresa Conlayers,

686
01:18:17,330 --> 01:18:19,530
our representative to the time board,

687
01:18:20,070 --> 01:18:22,870
who is telling me, yes, those will be the kinds of things

688
01:18:22,870 --> 01:18:25,370
we will address during the next set of hearings

689
01:18:26,030 --> 01:18:28,270
when they do hearings next.

690
01:18:29,970 --> 01:18:33,610
So, so thank you, Jason, appreciate it.

691
01:18:33,930 --> 01:18:35,510
And it looks like Bobby Gross.

692
01:18:36,030 --> 01:18:39,750
I know that name, Bobby Gross is next up.

693
01:18:42,030 --> 01:18:42,230
Oh.

694
01:18:47,560 --> 01:18:48,280
He or he did it.

695
01:18:48,980 --> 01:18:49,000
Yeah.

696
01:18:49,120 --> 01:18:49,360
Sorry.

697
01:18:49,640 --> 01:18:50,340
I got unmuted.

698
01:18:51,140 --> 01:18:54,480
Hey, just a quick comment or request.

699
01:18:54,720 --> 01:18:58,220
Can we get some of those stats that you provided that would be great?

700
01:18:58,480 --> 01:18:58,880
Oh, yeah.

701
01:18:59,740 --> 01:19:04,500
I'm so glad you mentioned that because what we always do is anybody that makes a formal presentation

702
01:19:04,500 --> 01:19:16,200
like mine and Alex's today. We post that on the BAAC BAC web page on the under the

703
01:19:16,200 --> 01:19:20,780
Elections Division at Secretary's State's office. So if you scroll down and

704
01:19:20,780 --> 01:19:25,520
believe it's under meetings or conferences, something like that under the

705
01:19:25,520 --> 01:19:29,280
elections, you'll see that BAC is listed there and you can go find anything

706
01:19:29,280 --> 01:19:37,260
from past times in which we've done these presentations. However, because you, Bobby Gross,

707
01:19:38,560 --> 01:19:46,680
my favorite Mason County clerk, have reached out today in the presentation. I will make sure

708
01:19:46,680 --> 01:19:51,500
that you get yours today. So this is over. I'll send it your way. Thank you. I appreciate that.

709
01:19:51,540 --> 01:19:57,640
No problem. I would like to mention that anything for the by-person election advisory commission

710
01:19:57,640 --> 01:19:59,780
is under laws and resources.

711
01:20:00,000 --> 01:20:29,840
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.

712
01:20:30,000 --> 01:20:37,520
or poll observers. And I'm just kind of concerned about how we're going to manage all the people

713
01:20:37,520 --> 01:20:44,040
who might be out attempting to do those kinds of things, this election, in addition to the

714
01:20:44,040 --> 01:20:45,660
approved poll watchers.

715
01:20:48,920 --> 01:21:02,280
Well, so under Colorado Law to be an official observer at either a

716
01:21:02,280 --> 01:21:11,360
designated by either our election office or potentially by the county and you would need to fit

717
01:21:11,360 --> 01:21:18,160
the criteria under the law to either be a watcher or to be an observer. So there are different

718
01:21:18,160 --> 01:21:26,780
two different ways you can go. And the people that and both of them require that you meet certain

719
01:21:26,780 --> 01:21:38,980
criteria and get pre-approval. In order to watch the check-in process and observe the check-in

720
01:21:38,980 --> 01:21:44,400
process, you and frankly a bunch of the other things where you might have access to personally

721
01:21:44,400 --> 01:21:53,240
identifying information. You have to take a class and be certified as a watcher or an observer

722
01:21:53,240 --> 01:21:59,800
to have access to that information. So we don't anticipate that there will be a lot of freelance

723
01:21:59,800 --> 01:22:07,260
people trying to observe because frankly it's not permitted under the law. And thus far I have not

724
01:22:07,260 --> 01:22:14,260
heard from a lot of either national or national groups interested in participating in observation

725
01:22:14,260 --> 01:22:21,160
for this election cycle. I think you're probably right that there will be party members representing

726
01:22:21,160 --> 01:22:30,060
the Democratic and Republican Party. But again, probably not as many as we saw in 2024 because

727
01:22:30,060 --> 01:22:36,020
people are just less inclined to be this level of engaged for a congressional election than

728
01:22:36,020 --> 01:22:44,700
they are for a presidential. But we will always, you know, try to manage through in those expectations.

729
01:22:44,820 --> 01:22:50,520
And if we see a surge of people, we will work with the counties to make sure that they're meeting

730
01:22:50,520 --> 01:22:54,600
their statutory obligations, as well as simultaneously conducting the election.

731
01:22:59,910 --> 01:23:00,990
Anything else?

732
01:23:03,880 --> 01:23:04,300
All right.

733
01:23:04,380 --> 01:23:05,000
Thank you, Barbara.

734
01:23:10,340 --> 01:23:10,680
All right.

735
01:23:10,860 --> 01:23:11,620
I do not see any issues.

736
01:23:11,940 --> 01:23:18,520
I'll just chime in that having making it easier for people to observe makes sense to me.

737
01:23:20,660 --> 01:23:25,060
It's much more difficult for people not affiliated with parties to observe.

738
01:23:25,380 --> 01:23:30,520
And, you know, of course we need to have proper security and decorum and so on.

739
01:23:30,520 --> 01:23:34,500
But living is important for elections.

740
01:23:35,660 --> 01:23:37,540
Yeah, and it's sort of county specific.

741
01:23:37,720 --> 01:23:41,540
There are counties where there are lots of observers or lots

742
01:23:41,540 --> 01:23:42,760
of watchers.

743
01:23:43,280 --> 01:23:45,620
Obviously, Boulder County comes to mind.

744
01:23:46,060 --> 01:23:50,400
They often will have so many watchers at the central

745
01:23:50,400 --> 01:23:54,300
campus facility that they'll have to come in in waves.

746
01:23:54,980 --> 01:23:59,700
Because there will be too many people in the room to be able to

747
01:23:59,700 --> 01:24:09,800
the group and actually do the work. So that's an example of a county that really has to be on their toes,

748
01:24:10,100 --> 01:24:18,540
have to have people that will manage all of the watchers and observers that are happening at that location.

749
01:25:00,180 --> 01:25:15,220
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.

750
01:25:16,140 --> 01:25:23,420
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.

751
01:25:23,420 --> 01:25:28,500
and aren't think our laws and policies do the very best

752
01:25:28,500 --> 01:25:31,000
to try to fluctuate that.

753
01:25:33,890 --> 01:25:35,670
It looks like we want to just get with that out

754
01:25:35,670 --> 01:25:38,190
to barb-winnery for being one of our servers

755
01:25:38,190 --> 01:25:43,690
during that, the RLA, so great job done there apply.

756
01:25:44,870 --> 01:25:46,230
Interested citizens.

757
01:25:47,270 --> 01:25:52,330
But this looks like migration has,

758
01:25:53,870 --> 01:25:54,390
Yes.

759
01:25:55,590 --> 01:25:56,230
Hi, Mike.

760
01:25:57,230 --> 01:25:57,490
Hey, Jeff.

761
01:25:58,150 --> 01:25:59,230
So I just have a question.

762
01:25:59,690 --> 01:26:08,510
You've mentioned how much growth there's been in the unaffiliated voters to the point where there are majority in and

763
01:26:08,510 --> 01:26:18,150
themselves, is there any conversation in your office about involving them more in the audit

764
01:26:18,150 --> 01:26:23,370
process, the observation, even Canvas board activities?

765
01:26:25,850 --> 01:26:31,090
Well, that sounds like a policy question. I'm more of a process guy, so I'm going to hand it

766
01:26:31,090 --> 01:26:36,410
to the policy people, John Alex Andrew, one of you, have any thoughts on that?

767
01:26:44,020 --> 01:26:46,540
I know this conversation, go, it's all right, go again.

768
01:26:47,480 --> 01:26:50,820
I mean, this conversation comes up in the election cleanup.

769
01:26:51,120 --> 01:26:54,780
I know I can't remember the specifics of the last conversation this year,

770
01:26:54,920 --> 01:26:57,340
as it related to the cleanup, but I know this is a

771
01:26:57,340 --> 01:27:00,080
pranegal point of conversation that I expected to come up.

772
01:27:00,240 --> 01:27:03,780
Next year as we look to another cleanup, especially since we ticked over that 50%

773
01:27:05,020 --> 01:27:09,280
but as of right now I don't have anything to speak to specifically in terms of policy changes in front

774
01:27:09,280 --> 01:27:12,140
of us, but that doesn't mean that isn't going to change at some point.

775
01:27:13,680 --> 01:27:19,520
Who would be the person that we would talk to in your office about such issues?

776
01:27:23,060 --> 01:27:27,860
Well, my two senses that that would be an Alex conversation.

777
01:27:29,600 --> 01:27:34,220
I would give Alex a call or drop him an email and he'll follow up.

778
01:27:34,400 --> 01:27:41,160
Okay, I'll just note that there are other, we are the Secretary of State's office,

779
01:27:41,160 --> 01:27:44,340
but the counties also have a big role in all of this.

780
01:27:44,780 --> 01:27:50,700
So, Matt or Carly or Jenny and others on the screen

781
01:27:50,700 --> 01:27:53,840
may very well have some thoughts on this one as well.

782
01:27:55,260 --> 01:27:55,740
Thank you.

783
01:28:02,420 --> 01:28:04,480
All right, any other questions?

784
01:28:06,840 --> 01:28:09,720
Comments, thoughts, predictions?

785
01:28:16,310 --> 01:28:17,030
All right, see, nothing.

786
01:28:18,530 --> 01:28:19,710
Well, hey, this has been a great meeting.

787
01:28:19,850 --> 01:28:21,070
We really appreciate it.

788
01:28:21,070 --> 01:28:25,590
And we'll be in touch soon for scheduling the next meeting.

789
01:28:25,810 --> 01:28:31,610
We do three of these a year, so I would expect one in the coming couple of months.

790
01:28:31,950 --> 01:28:33,830
Look for information related to that.