The Republican precinct officer who charged that improprieties should invalidate last week’s vacancy committee election to replace state Rep. Dan Nordberg escalated her complaint to the Colorado GOP Thursday after the committee chair dismissed her objections and said the election followed the rules.

Kanda Calef, a member of the House District 14 Republican vacancy committee, challenged the results of the Dec. 21 election won by Colorado Springs investment consultant Shane Sandridge on a 23-20 vote over longtime party activist Anita Miller, with Aaron Novy receiving 2 votes.

Nordberg announced in mid-December that he was stepping down from the El Paso County seat to take a job with the Trump administration as regional administrator of the Small Business Administration.

In a formal complaint filed Friday, Calef argued that another committee member was ineligible to participate and that Sandridge hadn’t received the required majority. The next day, she added a complaint that notice for the meeting went out a day later than the law requires.

“This was a typical party gathering where laws and bylaws are ignored for expediency,” Calef told Colorado Politics after submitting the challenge. “We are supposed to be the party of rule of law. What I saw was, there was a disregard for that.”

But Rex Louth, the Republican House District 14 chairman, rejected Calef’s complaint. He concluded Wednesday in an email that her various arguments were “without merit” and said he was affirming the vacancy committee’s election of Sandridge. Pursuant to Colorado law, Louth wrote, “his name shall be submitted to the Secretary of State after Rep. Nordberg’s resignation takes effect on January 8, 2018.”

Calef had objected that precinct officer Samuel Bryant shouldn’t have been allowed to vote at the meeting because public records showed he moved to another precinct months ago, something Bryant and Louth both acknowledge happened. But citing party bylaws, Louth said Bryant remains a precinct officer with voting privileges on vacancy committees until he resigns or is removed by the county GOP.

Besides, Louth added, Bryant has signed a sworn affidavit he voted for Miller so “[e]ven if his credentialing at the meeting had been improper … the error would have been harmless, because it would not have affected the outcome of the election.”

In a letter to the state party appealing Louth’s ruling, Calef called it “irrelevant” that Bryant swears he voted for the second-place finisher “because his having a ballot in the first place invalidates the entire process.”

She added, “[I]s the GOP really saying that anyone who has moved out of their precinct, the House District or even the state – who would be precluded by state law from voting and subject to voter fraud prosecution – are perfectly in their rights to cast a vote to replace a house representative unless affirmatively removed by action of the executive committee?”

Louth said Calef’s other objections similarly didn’t add up – 46 Republicans might have been credentialed for the meeting, but only 45 wound up voting, so the 23 votes Sandridge received constituted a majority, and Nordberg helped Louth deposit the meeting’s notices in the mail on the day the law required, regardless what the postmark showed.

Calef told Colorado Politic she was raising an additional objection with the state after she discovered another precinct officer appears to have been stripped of his position at some point prior to the meeting without being informed until he showed up at the vacancy committee and was denied credentials.

A spokesman for the Colorado GOP declined to comment on Calef’s appeal, and Sandridge told Colorado Politics he didn’t have a comment either.