Voting booth attendants show Tech. Sgt. Rebekah Virtue voting literature at the Spouses' Club Spring Bazaar March 27, 2010, Eielson Air Force Base. U.S. Air Force photo by/Airman 1st Class Janine Thibault).
President Donald Trump and his party are still pushing for a ban on mail-in ballots and citizenship ID verification to vote. But when a state GOP convention required an in-person vote and IDs simply to select its endorsed candidates, it turned into chaos.
9News reported on Thursday that the Colorado GOP Convention did "not instill confidence in in-person election integrity" when it voted on candidates.
Two Republican lawmakers are seeking to run for governor and have qualified for the convention vote: State Rep. Scott Bottoms and Ministry leader Victor Marx. To get officially nominated, however, voters had to be properly credentialed, and somehow, 90 more ballots were cast than the number of officially registered delegates.
"We have an overvote situation," GOP Parliamentarian Al Gage told the crowd. "We don't believe there's been any fraud at all. Possibly. And if it is, it's minuscule.”
There were a mere 2,000 people at the convention. Ticketing and registration for the convention opened at 7 a.m. but it took the entire morning to navigate and ensure folks got their badges and ballots. Individuals were then told to "register their ballot by scanning a QR code on their badge before entering the arena.
"It's readily apparent that not everyone scanned their badges as they came in," Gage said.
"You can come in that door or that door or that door or that door, and we didn't have scanners everywhere at the very beginning," said Colorado GOP Credentials Chair Adrienne Sandoval, pointing around. "Yes, I failed, I'm sorry."
The official statement from the Colorado GOP said that there could have been issues with the QR scanning. There was absolutely no voter fraud because "volunteers verified each delegate against a photo ID before issuing a ballot," then the "teller committee members marked credentials before allowing each delegate to cast a ballot."
Then they ended up with 90 more votes.
"We are confident that each ballot cast was submitted by a duly authorized delegate who had presented valid photo ID," the party promised in a statement. "The discrepancy resulted from incomplete scanning of credentials, not unauthorized voting."
Former Arapahoe County Clerk Matt Crane was on hand to witness the mess.
"I've never seen an election run by election officials, state or federal elections that have been that much of a cluster," Crane said.
Republicans in the federal government are currently pushing nationwide regulations requiring each person to have a photo ID that identifies them as an American citizen. The so-called "SAVE Act" would require a birth certificate or passport to reregister to vote because, currently, only five states in the U.S. indicate citizenship on the Real ID.
So, the flub wasn't a good look for the party.
Crane has maintained that the state and county-run elections have been legitimate and accurate. He criticized "party factions" who want to close Colorado's primary elections and control who is selected, rather than have voters cast ballots.
"The people pushing that, they honestly don't know their ass from first base about how to run elections or what election integrity means," he said. "So, with a lot of these folks, it's do what I say, not what I do. I just pray the light bulb goes off and people realize how they've been deceived by these people."
The report said they had the same credentialing problems in 2024.
This year, however, the party delegates voted to include "election integrity" in the party platform. They named it “Make Colorado Great Again Through Election Integrity.”