Mesa County DA finds human error behind election audit used to prop up fraud claims

(CN) — Following a criminal investigation, the Mesa County, Colorado, District Attorney’s Office concluded human error, not criminal fraud, caused anomalies identified in an election audit used to prop up county elections chief Tina Peters’ claims of voter fraud.

The audit, compiled at Peters’ request, found three suspicious events occurred in October during the 2020 election and in March 2021 during the Grand Junction municipal election. After ruling out county elections staff, the report suggested these events were triggered by either Dominion Voting Systems staff or an unknown remote party via the internet.

Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein disagreed with the audit's conclusion during a presentation to the Board of County Commissioners on Thursday.

“We can prove what actually happened, and that was human error,” Rubinstein said. “We have evidence that [elections manager] Sandra Brown did both. We have no evidence that what Sandra Brown did was in ill intent or a criminal offense. We find no evidence that it affected the election at all.”

Brown was fired from her position this past November.

Rubenstein said neither Brown nor the audit report’s authors, Walter Daugherity and Jeffrey O’Donnell, agreed to speak with investigators.

In a statement provided to Rubenstein, O’Donnell said he declined to cooperate because “the report clearly states that it was written in defense of Tina Peters and others’ legal cases.”

Peters, the Mesa County clerk-recorder and now a candidate for Colorado secretary of state, first came under scrutiny in 2021 after a security breach in her office led to the exposure of sensitive passwords and election processes.

Following a grand jury investigation, Peters faces three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant, four felony counts related to impersonation and identity theft and a misdemeanor count each of official misconduct, violating her duties and failing to comply with the secretary of state’s requirements.

While the DA's office treated the election audit as a separate matter from Peters criminal case, she has used the information from the audit to justify her security leaks.

The audit identified three anomalies and alleged 20,346 votes were “preloaded” into the county’s voting machines during the 2020 election. As evidence, the report points to 10 batches of ballots, about 1,000 total, loaded into the adjudication system at a rate faster than any machine could have tabulated them on Oct. 21, 2020.

Tabulation, or the counting of ballots, is a separate process from adjudication, which checks ballots for errors and directs rejected ballots to human judges for review.

Video surveillance recorded election judges feeding the ballots into the tabulator. The information was then sent to the adjudication machines all at once, about an hour later.

The audit also found two instances of the adjudication system being reset, once in October 2020 and again in March 2021, something out of the norm during an election.

Video footage and phone logs indicate Brown reset the machines to troubleshoot computer issues. Brown also swapped out an adjudication computer during the 2020 election to solve a technical problem.

Rubenstein noted elections staff have two other available options before outright halting the adjudication process and that Dominion technical support should have been called before Brown did a full reset.

Still, Rubenstein found that in both elections, all of the ballots in question were counted once, even if adjudicated twice.

To a roar of laughter from the audience in attendance, evidence was also presented indicating the voting machine computers were never connected to the internet, as claimed: the Windows software has never been updated and computer clocks lag behind those constantly updated online.

Voting machines are not connected to the internet as a security measure to protect against hacking. People who subscribe to election conspiracy theories, including Peters, have claimed without evidence that voting results were altered via internet access in the 2020 election.

While no credible evidence of mass fraud has been found to have occurred during the 2020 election, the belief persists.

Peters' attorney did not respond immediately to a request for comment.  

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