Clerk's office re-examining election procedures 

Clerk's office re-examining election procedures

• Charles Ashby

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters said a member of her staff who no longer works in the department is to blame for the 574 ballots from last fall’s election that were discovered in a drop box located a few steps from her office.

Though Peters said she accepts full responsibility for the error, and apologized for it, she said one of her former election workers — she declined to say who — failed to empty the box when it was locked at 7 p.m. on Election Day last November, as required by law.

The issue came to light Thursday, when Peters, through County Attorney Patrick Coleman’s office, issued a press release announcing that the ballots were found in a drop box that is located at the entrance to the Mesa County Central Services Building, 200 S. Spruce St., where Peters’s office is located.

“I have an idea who did it, but I don’t want to state it at this point because it’s a former employee,” Peters said in a telephone interview Friday while returning from Colorado Springs, where she attended a rally for President Donald Trump.

“I have a feeling that I know who did it based on what other employees have said,” she added. “I have to be real careful not to accuse anybody. It’s really not going to change anything to do that at this point. That box was checked at 5 and it should have been swept again at 7 when it was locked.”

The clerk said the old ballots were discovered on Tuesday when someone in her office went to retrieve new ballots for the presidential primary, which is going on now. She said none of the six other drop-off boxes around the county had old ballots.

Mesa County Treasurer Sheila Reiner, who was the previous clerk for eight years before being term-limited, said if Peters had followed the procedures Reiner initiated for drop-off boxes, the office could have found those ballots before the presidential primary even began.

“We would send our mail ballot room person and a temporary worker to go clean them and check them and verify that all the locks were working before an election,” Reiner said. “They didn’t verify that things were clean (before the presidential primary).”

A spokesman for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said the office’s county regulation support manager is to arrive in Grand Junction on Sunday to review election procedures in Peters’s office to see if they are being followed properly.

That spokesman, Steve Hurlbert, said the review shouldn’t be seen as a formal investigation or intervention, though that can be a result.

The last time that happened was in 2012, when the office investigated then Teller County Clerk Judith Jamison, determining that she was completely ill-prepared to operate that year’s primary election. The office officially took control of that primary and the following general election on grounds that Jamison “was completely unprepared to fulfill her duties,” the office said in an August 2012 election report of its findings.

At the time, Jamison refused to resign, but eventually did so in January 2013 after a recall attempt was started.

Peters has come under scrutiny in recent months over staffing issues in her office. In 15 months on the job, nearly two dozen members of her 32-person staff have quit, including her chief deputy and head elections supervisor.

That supervisor, Jessica Empson, resigned less than a month after the Nov. 5 election.

Peters has yet to replace Empson, saying she can’t find anyone qualified to take the job. Instead, Peters said she’s hired three temporary workers to help in the elections division.

Peters said she’s already temporarily lost two workers due to illness, including her new chief deputy, Belinda Knisley, who has back issues, and Elections Coordinator Rebecca White, whose husband recently had a stroke.

Late last year, Peters made a plea to the Mesa County Board of Commissioners to add four more positions to her four-member elections staff, saying this year’s presidential primary, regular primary and general election — along with new state requirements — is making it nearly impossible to do her job without more help.

The commissioners instead transferred $41,000 in one-time funding to allow Peters to hire a temporary elections specialist as part of her consulting budget.

Peters also said because of the presidential primary she had to tell officials in Fruita, Palisade and Collbran that her office can’t help them conduct their elections in April, saying the county’s elections system doesn’t allow her to do more than one election at a time.

Reiner, however, said that’s not accurate.

Reiner said those computers can handle up to four separate elections, and said that either Peters’ lack of experience with conducting elections or a lack of adequately trained staff is the problem. Reiner said that while county clerk offices aren’t required to run municipal elections, it’s been a decades-old tradition in Mesa County because those cities, which are billed for running their elections, end up saving thousands of dollars in taxpayer money.

“More than the ability, I think what Tina is lacking at this point is experience,” Reiner said. “When you don’t have the experience, you have to rely on staff to have the experience, and she has neither at this point.”

Palisade Mayor Roger Granat said the town will be forced to hire an outside organization to provide the necessary voting machines and printed ballots, but doesn’t yet know what that will cost.

“Before this, Mesa County has been very gracious in providing us with the necessary information we needed to verify our voters and in providing the machine to count the ballots and to actually print the ballots,” Granat said. “This year, for whatever reason, those accommodations were not offered.”

Town voters are to decide several town board seats and elect a new mayor at its April 7 elections.

Meanwhile, Fruita also is struggling with how to conduct its elections this year, which are for mayor and three council seats.

The city expects to have to spend about $2,000-$3,000 more to conduct elections this year than they had anticipated. The city had budgeted $16,000.

“It’s been quite a process,” said Fruita’s deputy city clerk, Deb Woods, adding that the county has been operating its elections for about 30 years. “It was kind of a shock, but we believe we can conduct a fair and impartial election.”

By law, the 574 found ballots cannot be opened and officially counted without a court order and only Peters can request that. She said the uncounted ballots would not have impacted any of the questions on last fall’s ballot because none of them were close.

“It upsets me as much as anybody else because the people of Mesa County elected me to do this job,” Peters said. “I can understand how this affects people. They go to the trouble to research the issues, they fill out their ballot, they get in the car and drive it over and they expect it to be counted. So I feel like it’s a failure on our part, and it’s something that will never happen again.”