You may recall that Heidigan All was on the show a month, no, a few weeks ago. It's all running together as a blur during election season, asking some questions about certain things that she had seen or was concerned about when it came to our election integrity. And now she's out again saying, hey, can we have a conversation about this? And I thought i'd bring her back on because there are some local newspapers who are given her crap about asking the questions.
Heidi, welcome back to the show.
First of all, Hey, Mandy, it's great to be on.
Well, let's talk about the questions that you are asking and why you are asking them. Okay, let's start with that, because I had a conversation with Matt Crane from the Colorado Clerks Association. He was on Ross's show today specifically about.
Some of these issues.
But I want to know why they came to your radar in the first place and why you decided to say, look, we need to talk about this.
Yeah, Mandie, Well, after my election in twenty two, it's been two years, I decided to just take a look into some of the things I was hearing on the campaign trail. People's concerns because twenty five percent of Republicans did not show up to vote in that election. A lot of that was because of their concerns around the elections.
So I just said, let's just dig in and see.
And so Kurt Hoffman and I asked for a recount in Douglas County in his race because his numbers were really odd and he's the only Republican that didn't win in that county, and he was in an orplus ten districts, so he should have won by ten points. So we start digging in and we got I mean, we got blocked every which way to Sunday, and that's a Republican county, and we were getting blocked from asking questions, getting access to information.
So we kept digging.
A hired an attorney and we were able to after a year do a pretty full audit of paper ballots in that county.
We scanned over eighty three thousand of them.
But what came up were things that we weren't necessarily looking at, Like drop boxes are not as secure as we like to think. The US Post Office invoicing was not undeliverable, ballots are not tracked well, and that's the law they have to be. We found that there was remote Wi Fi access in Douglas County's voting system, and the clerk said there is not, and the county attorney said there is not when we asked them face to face.
But when we looked at the purchase records of the equipment, we found that it was and they had to end up admitting that it was. And then Matt Crane eventually admitted that there were twelve counties that had remote access in their voting systems after Jennick Griswold said absolutely not. It's all removed in the Trusted Bill. It's stripped of any access. She said that in twenty twenty. So fast forward to now and what's happening in Mesa County with
these three votes that were put through the system. That leads to another issue, which is signature verification. And there's all kinds of issues with signature verification. I didn't even bring that up when I did my press conference because I was kind of I was trying to keep things simple and addressings that we could fix before the election.
But this is a whole new bag of worms.
Yeah, I want to address a couple of things because I asked him specifically about a couple of these issues. And I want to talk for a second about the undeliverable ballots and the reconciliation that the various organizations get. And one of the things that Matt told me was those undeliverable numbers also include undeliverable mail, just general mail.
So he said, those.
Numbers are never going to match, they're never going to be the same because they don't separate out the ballots from the undeliverable mail. So is there any other information other than that about there being undeliverable mail?
What else is happening there?
Yes, there's two big issues with what he said. One is the law requires that the post office bill the county invoice the county for every undeliverable ballot that they handle. That's technically how they're accounting for all the undeliverable ballots they're getting back. If they are not doing that and breaking it out so that it's easy to understand for
the clerk, that is an issue in itself. But what Bob Cooper found when he dug in was it's actually really easy to tell by the weighting of the items in the invoice which ones are ballots and I can send you an example of this or tweet it out so everybody can see. It's not complicated to see in the invoicing how you can break it out.
So that's not accurate. But really it comes down.
To it's the law that they are supposed to track these undeliverable ballots. And we found thirty thousand that were unaccounted for in nine counties. That's not okay, Like, what's happening to these ballots?
So you guys use the actual invoices that have the weight. So you pulled out the balloting from the undeliverable mail, that's where you came up with that number.
Yes, you can look at the invoicing or it's called a ballot I can't remember the name of it, a ballot reconciliation document, and you can actually see how it's split out.
Wait, and you know which ones are balid.
So and even if say that that's not true and you couldn't figure it out, that's not following the law.
The law says that you have the.
Post Office has to charge for every ballot that they handle, and that's their way of accounting for it. Now, do I agree that that's the best way to account No. This is one thing that really bothers me, Mandy, is throughout all these processes they are not using general accounting
standard practices. We don't have good auditing processes in place, whether it's the signature verification or the undeliverable ballots or even the machines and knowing if they have remote Wi Fi access, there should be outside forensic auditors in whatever thing you're looking at that come in and look at what's happening and make sure that the government is doing the right things. Because to your point in your episode, in your segment earlier, not many people trust the government
to do a lot right now. And to restore that trust, we need sunshine, We need transparency. And that's what I'm trying to do, was provide transparency and good information and asking the right questions, the hard questions, so that voters can trust the process again and feel good about voting.
And I told Matt that I want people to have faith in the system like that is and just like you want to have people have faith in the system. But at one point I asked him specifically about about the drop box cameras because some of these drop boxes are not well lit. They have poor quality cameras. So somebody did want to monitor who was dropping off, you know, a group of ballots, harvested ballots. Maybe they do have a legit purpose. Maybe that's all their family members. You
don't really have that option. And he said, look, we've just not had that happen before. And I told him, point blink, that's not a good answer. When you have people that are concerned about election integrity going forward, it hasn't happened yet is not comforting, right, So I think the camera situation is probably the easy to fix. And have you had any conversations or any follow up with any clerks who have said, you know what, we're going
to upgrade our cameras. We want to make sure that people have confidence in the system.
So Manny Mark Millman's been working on this for a couple of years and he is in Boulder County and he's tried relentlessly to get them to upgrade the cameras. There's a very inexpensive system that you can put in place that's effective, that works well. Now.
I come from Camp Balow where we have webcams all over the place. They're high definition.
It's not hard, but they have been resistant to doing that, and as we looked at the systems across the state, the ones that we could monitor or see, we were very disappointed. We found very very few camera systems.
That were high quality.
And that's important because, according to the Rule seven, the minimal standards that have to be met to submit evidence to court if there is wrongdoing, these systems don't meet that evidence. So even if it is pointed in the right direction, which very very few are now, Douglas County just put theirs on live stream. But if you look at them, Mandy, they're so far away. You can't see how many ballots people are putting in, and you can't see a person's face, you can't see a license plate.
So Matt's saying, they haven't had this be a problem. How do they know. They don't review the footage, they don't watch it, they don't pay attention, and in most of the cameras you can't see what's going on.
That to me seems the most easily fixable problem, Like that should be a no brainer. We should be able to do that right now. And Heidi, you know, I understand Matt's frustration, because Matt's like, Ah, all of these conversations just undermine people's confidence in the system. And where he's sitting and I don't want to put words in
his mouth. That's not what I'm doing here, But I feel like where he's sitting as the as the head of the Clerk of Courts organization in Colorado, he knows all of the things and he listed him off on Ross's show all of the things they're trying to do
to ensure voter integrity. How do we get from a point where we and me and you and everybody out there who's listening can just say, Okay, you know what, this is as secure as it can be without going back to in person voting with a voter ID, which would honestly be my preference at this point.
Yeah. I mean he first met needs to pick up the phone and call me.
I've tried reaching out to him many times in the last couple of months, and he hasn't responded. Instead, he gives information to other people to report on air. Same with Sherry Davis, the clerk in Douglas County. I've asked her for meetings since April since we did this audit, and sh and her team have been very like resistant to meeting with me, and instead they come out and do a press conference and talk about how great everything is instead of just talking and having a debate or
a conversation about how to make things better. The last thing is, you know, I want to trust our elections. I want everyone to vote with their whole heart in the next week.
It's only a week away.
But that doesn't mean that we should just blindly trust these people. And especially when Jenner Griswold lied to us about whether there was remote access in these machines, and Matt said that too over the last couple of years, and many clerks have And I don't blame the clerks. The clerks are not technology experts. They're trusting what they're hearing from the Secretary of State and then head of their clerks association. But why don't we have an open
debate after the election? Why don't Mandy you could host a debate. I've also somebody could host a debate. We get our experts, they get out their experts, and.
We hash it out.
I would love that. I would absolutely love that. I said this earlier, Heidi. You know, I asked Matt some of the questions. I'm like, look, I want good answers to good questions. What's frustrating to me is that we're not even allowed to ask a question. That's the frustrating thing. It's like, look, we're trying to be proactive, we're trying to address those issues that a reluctant voter might have in trusting the system.
So why can't we all just get on.
The same page and say, Okay, it may seem redundant to me, but if that's going to make everybody else feel.
Better, then let's do it.
I mean my mind, that's what should be happening, and every voter should want the votes integrity protected.
And right now in Mason County.
There are three people who are going to have their votes canceled out by fake ballots that were turned in by somebody else.
And that's just the facts. And no matter if they.
Voted for something else that these fake ballots are voting, they lost their right to vote because someone cheated. And that's just that needs to be addressed with the forcefulness that I think it deserves. And that's not what I heard from Matt today. I hear a lot of with you know, the system worked, a quarter of the bad ballots got through that's not okay with me, shouldn't be okay with any votor in.
Colorado, Mandy, how do we know it's only three votes? We're going to say it could be a thousand votes. It could be ten thousand votes. We don't know because we don't have any outside experts looking at the systems and processes we have. It's self regulating, and these are not security experts that are looking over these systems. They're good intention people who want the best things, but they're not security experts.
And the answers that.
I got back when we asked the hard security and technology questions were hogwash.
I've learned enough to know that they're hogwash.
And so if you're going to pretend like everything's great and call me reckless and call me an elections conspiracy theorist like Jesse Paul with the cart the Sun is, he won't even answer a question over email. When I pushed back and said, why didn't you interview me, Jesse, I have a good.
Relationship with you.
Why are you calling me names instead of actually digging in and talking about these things?
All the media is doing that.
Channel seven interviewed me for ten minutes in the car in the parking lot of McDonald's. I gave them all the reasons we're doing a public observer dropbox program, and they didn't air any of it. Instead, they just listened to the Secretary of States talking points and cut out everything I said and put a little clip that had nothing to do with why we were doing it.
Well, I mean, we'll leave that rhetorical question just hanging out there.
Why they do what they do?
Heidi, I'm glad you're asking the questions, and I would love As a matter of fact, I'm going to get working right now after the election is over, so probably January, when we get the results of the votes. I'm only being half sarcastic there. I will set something up and we'll have a conversation because, in my mind, regardless of party, election integrity should be very important because everyone should know that your vote counts and no one is going to cast a fake ballot and cancel it out.
I don't think that's too much to ask. Hidigan all. Great to see you as always, my friend.
Thanks Mandy for all you do, Thanks for hearing me out.