The votes from Super Tuesday are in, but the big story of the day – at least here in Mesa County – isn’t the tabulated results, but the performance of the embattled county clerk, Tina Peters.

Not that we expect any problems. Extra scrutiny from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office assures that every ballot cast during the primary will have been collected and counted.

Secretary of State Jena Griswold ordered an improvement plan for Peters’ office and sent one of her staffers to Grand Junction to provide oversight and guidance after Peters disclosed that 574 ballots from last November’s general election hadn’t been collected from a dropbox near the county’s main elections office.

Peters apologized and promised it was a one-time mistake that won’t happen again. (How could it when the state has been forced to make sure ballots are processed accurately?) But we found her statement accepting responsibility for the failure lacking. She blamed a single, unnamed employee despite procedures in place that bar a single person from picking up ballots by themselves.

Peters dismissed our call to resign. Why would she when she has the full faith and confidence of the Mesa County Republican Party? In a news release lauding Peters’ “honesty” and “transparency” in reporting “an unfortunate mistake,” local GOP officials characterized the Republican Party as the “nation’s strongest defender of secure, accurate, and trustable elections.”

The Republican Party has certainly made voter fraud an issue. Back in 2011, former Secretary of State Scott Gessler, a Republican, went before Congress and made a blockbuster statement that 16,270 non-citizens were registered to vote in Colorado and 5,000 of them actually had cast ballots in the 2010 state elections.

But an investigation fell well short of substantiating those claims. As the Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reported in 2013, Gessler’s office found that only 155 of the state’s 3.5 million registered voters were suspected non-citizens. In July of that year, Gessler referred the list to 15 district attorneys across the state, recommending prosecution. Ashby checked with those DAs four months later and found none of the referrals led to criminal prosecutions, though some remained under investigation at that time.

Criticism that he was stoking fear where none really existed led Gessler to say that Democrats have a “cavalier, see-no-evil, hear-no-evil attitude toward elections.”

Despite a lack of evidence of massive voter fraud, President Donald Trump appointed a voting integrity commission, which disbanded without uncovering evidence to support claims that it’s a widespread problem.

Peters didn’t campaign on the issue. Her platform was more about re-opening some closed offices for motor vehicle registrations and improving customer experience. But the local Republican Party was quick to point out that because no ballots were tampered with or lost, Peters’ mistake was “trivial” compared to “massive deficiencies and problems with other state voting systems.”

So, while expressing, dare we say, “a cavalier” attitude toward incompetence, local GOP officials still managed to suggest that robbing 574 voters of their electoral voices isn’t as bad as the potential for voter fraud to occur – somewhere – because, hey, mistakes happen and the uncollected ballots wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

Politicizing something like election security leads to this kind of tortured logic. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic elections clerk getting a pass for this sort of blunder from Republicans.