When Tom Dunn signed up to work as an election judge in La Plata County in 2020, he was skeptical of the security of Colorado’s elections.
The unaffiliated voter wanted to know if the rumors that were swirling – that tabulation machines can be hacked, that malicious poll workers could steal or destroy ballots, or that people were voting illegally – had any truth to them.
His confidence in the integrity of the state’s elections was about 50% at the time.
“I was ignorant,” Dunn said. “I didn’t know, and I wanted some direct information. I didn’t want to have just hearsay, rumors (and) conspiracy theories.”
So, he signed up to be an election judge to get a look at how the system worked from the inside. He started working signature verification. This year, Dunn is working his third election for County Clerk and Recorder Tiffany Lee as a ballot judge, assisting voters at service centers.
“This is a good, safe, secure voting system,” Dunn said. “I was somewhat of a skeptic four years ago, and I became a believer.”
Today, Dunn’s confidence level in the security of Colorado elections is 100%.
Election security is just as big, if not a bigger issue in this upcoming election as it was in 2020. Former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee once more, is already preparing allegations of voter fraud and suppression upon which he could deny the security of the election in the event of a loss.
With a flurry of information around how elections are conducted – some of it intended to mislead voters – it’s not uncommon for the public to show up at Lee’s office with questions.
Mark Rushfeldt was part of a group of concerned citizens who went to meet with Lee earlier this year to ask questions about how elections are run and the maintenance of accurate voter roles. He described himself not as a doubter of election integrity, but as part of an uninformed public, someone who couldn’t be sure whether what he was reading online had any validity.
So Lee did what she usually does when confronted with questions: She made time to talk to the group.
“I don’t just turn them away and disregard them – I'll never do that,” Lee said.
She asked what suspicions the group had, what specific parts of the process were bothering them and what she could do to address those concerns.
“By the time we we’re done, I am personally satisfied that the La Plata County Clerk and Recorder’s Office is doing a really good job at maintaining the voter rolls, following the law, ensuring that we’ve got an election system in the county that is full of integrity,” Rushfeldt said. “And quite honestly, I was impressed.”
Election night coverage
Results from Tuesday’s general election will arrive after voting ends at 7 p.m. Because of The Durango Herald’s print deadline, results will not appear in Wednesday’s print edition. However, results and coverage can be found on election night at www.durangoherald.com, and full coverage and results will appear in Friday’s print edition.
When Lee offered to hire Rushfeldt to work as an election judge, he availed himself of the opportunity both for his personal edification and out of a sense of civic duty.
Dunn and Rushfeldt are not the only people who have brought questions, concerns, skepticism or even doubts about election integrity to Lee, only to find themselves working for her.
The two men fell into a camp of people whose fears or concerns can be assuaged, said Naomi Riess, a Republican working her second election as a judge. She herself took up the job this year in response to doubts she heard at her precinct caucus about the integrity of elections in Colorado. By working the election, Riess figured she could style herself as an authority in her party on election security.
In her work this year, Riess has encountered people like Dunn and Rushfeldt. But she has also run into conspiracy theorists who confront poll workers with a barrage of questions in a quest for little else but to have their suspicions confirmed.
“They’re essentially saying, ‘I am suspicious of you,’” she said. “That is unfair.”
Election judges are employed for only a number of days or weeks, and are paid a relatively low wage, somewhere between $17 and $25 hourly.
But the lion’s share of the malicious skepticism falls upon the elected, who in La Plata County makes $109,000 annually to run essentially two offices with a combined staff of 108. The hardships of the job are not without consequence: Since 2020, over a third of the state’s election administrators serving nearly half the state’s population have left the job, according to a 2023 nonpartisan report.
“This question of my ethics, questions of who I am – my integrity, (people saying) ‘you are corrupt’ – you hear that enough and it destroys you,” Lee said through restrained tears. “It starts to beat you down, because that’s not true. It’s a bald-faced lie.”
Lee has had to do little in the way of actual security improvements to ensure the integrity of La Plata County elections – “we didn’t need to do anything differently,” she said.
Signatures are verified on multiple levels, and every step of the process is handled in bipartisan teams of poll workers.
Lee worked with the Durango Fire Protection District fire marshal’s office to incorporate a fire suppression system into ballot boxes earlier this year. That decision started to look pretty good last week, after a suspected arsonist set fire to ballot boxes in Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, Washington.
La Plata County was not one of the 31 counties impacted by an accidental disclosure at the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office earlier this week, which lead to the release of some voting system passwords. The passwords were one part of a two-key entry system to voting machines, which are protected by many layers of complex security measures. All leaked passwords were changed out of an abundance of caution by Thursday night, the Secretary of State’s office said in a news release.
Although the optics of the error were unfortunate, the real impacts to election security were next to null.
“Even if passwords were leaked, that doesn’t change the fact that every ballot still has to go through either an ID or a signature verification process, and the system works,” Riess said.
In La Plata County, election judges say that from training new judges, trouble shooting on-the-spot and bringing ballot access to those who might have a harder time reaching it, Lee runs a tight ship.
“If she were a weight lifter, she’s lifted tons,” Dunn said. “She is on top of the game.”
rschafir@durangoherald.com
