Joining me now.
She is a familiar person to people who listened to this show. Heidi Ganal ran for governor and now she is not letting up. She is out there, sounded the alarm about some potential issues in our voting system, and had a presser last week to talk about it.
Good afternoon, Heidi Ganal.
How are you hi, miss Manny. I'm doing great. How about you?
I'm doing fantastic.
And you know, Heidi, I know you a little bit now, as they say, And one of the things that impresses me about you is that you ran a very tough governor's race. You did not succeed, but it has not stopped your passion for making sure that Coloraden's have a government that they can trust and that they can be proud of. And you've just pretty much not stopped since your race in continuing to find ways to make Colorado better.
And I just appreciate that about you very very much, because a lot of people would have just taken their marbles and gone home.
You know, I wanted to for a little bit, believe me, Mandy, but I care so much about this state and I want my kids to stay here, my grandkids to stay here. So after I learned so much about how the sausage is made. I think that's one of the biggest disservices candidates can make to their voters is to just walk away and not share what they learned, what they would do differently, how we can make things better.
So what did your what was your press conference about last week? Let's just jump in.
Yeah, so my press conference was about some findings we made in I would call it an audit of the twenty two election regarding Douglas County. And it wasn't really about my race. It was more about Kurt Huffman's race, who ran for House District forty three and lost. It's in Highlands Ranch and he lost in a Republican plus ten district in Douglas County, and Kurt raide a really good race. He was incumbent, and the final numbers just didn't make a lot of sense that we were looking
at that Kurt and I were talking about it. My numbers were even a little weird. So we said, well, let's just ask for a recount. That's our right, you know, that's every citizen's right. And we did that right after the election, and the whole process was crazy. They just blocked us at every turn, wouldn't let us do what we were You know, our rights constitutionally are to do and get access to see things that we should have
been able to see. So that prompted me to hire an attorney to dig in a bit and say, why are they blocking us? Why don't they want us to see things? And it took us about sixteen months to actually make any progress, but we did make progress. And I have to say Jerry Davis, the clerk in Douglas County, has been wonderful to work with, very accommodating. So is her staff. I think this goes bigger to Jennick Griswold
and the Secretary of State's office. And so it took two years to do this analysis and we got the results through the beginning of the results a couple of weeks ago, so we wanted to share it with the public.
So what did you guys discover?
And to be clear, Heidi, this is not about past elections, correct, This is just concerns that you guys have about our elections going forward. To be clear about that, because I'm getting snotty, like, you know, oh, she's an election tonight. This is not about any pass election, really, right, I mean what you know? Yeah, So go ahead and talk about what you guys found.
Yeah, Mandy, this is about restoring trust for the people that don't trust our elections and don't want to vote because of it, and that's a travesty. So I thought, what can we do to restore trust? Well, I always believe sunshine is the best cure for that. So one of the things that we discovered, which we weren't really looking for, was that the machines the voting systems actually do have remote Wi Fi access and can connect to the Internet. And I'm not saying anything happened, but the
potential for bad actors to do something is there. And this is what really kicks me off me and he is that many of our public officials have been misleading I would venture to say lying in the case of Jenna Griswold, because she knows everything that goes on in our elections, and it really upsets me that they just aren't honest and talking about security and state when it comes to the voting systems. And I'd love to read you a quote from Jenni Griswold if it would help put things in perspective.
True.
Okay, So this number fifteenth, twenty twenty, she's talking to the Legislative Audit Committee and they're having a hearing on election integrity and genesis. Voting systems are never connected to and cannot be accessed through the Internet because Wi Fi and Bluetooth capability are stripped from the unit before use, and all other connective technology is disabled by the trusted.
Build Okay, So essentially they're not connected to the Internet.
And what did you guys find?
We found that through the purchase orders and through verifying it with Douglas County clerks. The voting systems used there, how are have Wi Fi remote access cards within them that can be activated or de activated. But it's very complicated to do that and connect to the Internet remotely.
Okay, the possibility exists, though we have no we're not saying that it is uh is happening, correct, right, Okay? So what needs to happen to give you and therefore others more confidence that these machines cannot be hacked, because that's.
What this is all about. Right.
We've now had several hackers demonstrate with certain machines and other places how easy it is to hack into the system. We have not had that demonstration here in Colorado, but the possibility could exist, is that what we're.
Saying absolutely, and we've been working with some really sophisticated smart people to figure out if this is accurate, if this is if it's if it's actually a possibility, if this happened, it's very possible. And so what needs to happen is they need to take the cards out of the machines. It's not real complicated. And Douglas County said, well, we can't do that. The Secretary of State has to talk to you about that. So we tried to set up a meeting and of course they didn't respond.
So nobody I mean thing, it's such a small thing, and it's an insignificant thing that sounds like it would be really easy to take care of, and you just can't get any traction and even saying we should take care of this.
Right anany What this comes down to is restoring trust with the voters. So Riswald misled the public, So fix it. So make sure that there aren't these cards in any of our voting systems. And we only looked at Douglas County. We did not look at other counties, but it's very likely or possible that they are in the other voting systems, and I would encourage everybody to ask your county clerks that question, or your county commissioner is that question, But
it's the possibility, it's the rebuilding of trust. It's how we get people back on board with our elections and believing that they're the gold standard and not just gold.
So the thing that gets me about this, and the reason why I think nothing is going to happen here, Heidi, is that the Democrats, they're like, there's nothing wrong with the election system. It's fine, there's nothing to see. So the only people that are like, yeah, we should probably make this secure seem to be from the right. And unfortunately in Colorado, the people on the right just don't matter very much to the Secretary of State.
No, and I'm going to get called all kinds of names. I already am on Twitter. And a really frustrating thing that happened around the press conferences. We had nine Knews there, we had color of Public Radio, we had Fox thirty one. We had a contract writer I believe from the Denver Post, and not one of them covered the story. They were all there. They stayed for the entire conference, and none of them put a peep out about this.
Like I said, people on the right don't matter in this state. And I mean, am I wrong? Because if there are a lot of people in this state who are concerned about election integrity, not because there's some kind of election denier, but they just want to know that their vote is not going to be canceled out by someone who is either dead. By the way, I have a story on the blog today about the new Jennia Griswold loss. She is now being forced to demonstrate that
dead people or not registered to vote in Colorado. This should be such a nothing burger that it should have already been.
Done, But she fought it.
She fought just making sure that we don't have thirty thousand dead people on our voter rolls right now. I mean that should indicate to me that this woman shouldn't be in charge. It should be in my view, Heidi, if someone comes and says, we have a legitimate concern that this is happening, and can you take care of it, the answer should be yes. If this is going to make people trust our system more, yes, let's do it. You're not asking for like crazy expensive stuff here.
No, and it's not even just Jenna. The clerks know what they're ordering when they order these machines. And just in September, Sarah McCaffey, who's the spokesperson for the Jeff co Kenny Clerk's office, said, no counting machines in Colorado are connected to the Internet. And also this is a bipartisan thing. Wayne Williams has said the same thing back
in sixteen. He said, to start with, none of our tabulation software and none of our tabulation machines are connected to the Internet, so they cannot be hacked from the outside. And finally, in June of this year, Bobby growth masa County clerk, said, Mesa County ballot processing equipment is not connected to the Internet in any way. And I say, we don't know for sure in these other counties if
it is or not, but it sure is. The spect of Douglas Counties is to check with the rest of the counties to make sure that they're not and these people are being accurate and truthful when they're talking about their voting systems.
Well, so, Heidi, I'm glad. I wish that we were not so polarized in this state. You know, there have been a couple of things that have happened lately that made me realize that if you're on the right in Colorado and you have the nerve to sound the alarm about anything, whether it is the takeover of apartment buildings by a Venezuelan gang or the possibility of bad actors interfering in our election, the only thing I could say is, I hope, Heidi, and I can't believe I'm going to
say this out loud. I hope that if some hardcore right wing computer hackers listen this, wouldn't it be funny if they hacked into the machines and all the Republicans won in the state. You better bet that election integrity would be at the top of the list for the Secretary of State.
After that, Oh, tuche manny touche. And there's a couple other two key issues I can go over real quickly that sure goods that are important if you have time. Sure one is the post office. The post office gets undeliverable ballots back and it is their responsibility to report to the county Clerk's office how many there were, and they actually get paid for those. So they sent an invoice. A group that we work with, colorad and for an Institute for Fair Elections, did an audit of the Post
Office invoices and most of them were incorrect. They did eleven counties and significantly incorrect and could not it couldn't be explained. There were over twelve thousand ballots that were just not accounted for. And so we've got to make sure that our accounting with the Post Office and the County Clerk's office is accurate and that it meets at least basic accounting stand which it doesn't right now. And then the third thing is the drop boxes. The way
they monitor the drop boxes is silly. It's just plain silly. They use low definition cameras that cannot be admissible in court in most cases, and they point them in a direction where you can't actually see anything, and they record all this footage and they're supposed to be monitoring it for bad things happening, and they don't typically look at that. And so what we'd like to do is encourage citizens.
And we fought the Secretary of State on this. We almost took her to a federal lawsuit over First Amendment rights. Citizens are allowed to observe those drop boxes, and there's certain guidelines you should use. You should never intimidate voters, but that's our right a citizens. So we're going to have more information about how people can do that to protect our drop boxes and make sure there's no bad actors dealings there.
Okay, So there's a lot going on here.
I wish that I thought anything would happen, but I just have no confidence in our politicized Secretary State's office. People need to understand that Jennack Groswald has been such an.
Outlier for this position.
She has been an absolute partisan hack in the one department, right, the one department where is critical for someone to at least give the appearance of impartiality, but she has done the exact opposite the entire time she's been in office. She should have been bounced out, but the hatred for Donald Trump was so big in this state and Republicans in general that she didn't get bounced out when she should have. So I'm glad that you're at least calling
attention to this stuff, Heidi. I just don't have a lot of confidence that anything will happen because we are so thoroughly run by Democrats in this state, and they just don't care what we think.
That's the reality.
Unfortunately. I think you're right, Manny, But I'm tenacious, you know that. Yeah, they can call me names all they want. I'm going to keep on it and I'm going to make sure that this seeds the light of day and that voters understand what's happening and we can do better to protect our vote. That's all We're acting so that we can restore trust in our vote here in Colorado.
I agree, HII and all.
Thanks for everything you do, and we will talk to you again very soon.
That's great, man, all right,