Six individuals who circulated petitions last year for a congressional candidate are facing charges of forging signatures and attempting to influence election officials into putting the candidate on the Republican primary ballot in the 7th Congressional District, the Colorado Attorney General’s Office announced on Tuesday.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office referred the case after noticing an unusually high number of signatures in the petitions submitted by Carl Andersen did not match signatures in voter files, Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a news release.

The investigation found no wrongdoing on the part of Andersen or the petition-gathering firm he hired, Grassfire LLC, Weiser’s office said.

“Colorado’s best-in-class election system depends on individuals playing by the rules and acting with integrity. When candidates, their agents, or others in the process are deceitful and break the rules, they must be held accountable. We will continue to take such cases serious and take action when the evidence so warrants,” Weiser said in a statement.

Andersen, a Woodland Park construction company owner and first-time candidate, attempted to petition onto the 2022 GOP primary ballot in the Jefferson County-based congressional district, but Secretary of State Jena Griswold determined he failed to submit a sufficient number of valid signatures from fellow registered Republicans.

According to election officials, more than three-quarters of the 4,462 signatures his campaign turned in were rejected, leaving the candidate 455 signatures short of the required 1,500 valid signatures. Andersen’s campaign also unsuccessfully sued Griswold to reverse the ruling.

Republican Erik Aadland won a three-way primary for the nomination in the 7th district against Tim Reichert and Laurel Imer, but lost the general election to then-state Sen. Brittany Pettersen, a Lakewood Democrat, who was unopposed for her party’s nomination.

Investigators found that 21 of the signatures on Andersen’s petitions belonged to voters who had died before they supposedly signed the petition, an investigator for the attorney general said in an arrest affidavit. In addition, more than a dozen names appeared multiple times on the petition, though none of them signed the petition, charging documents alleged.

Charged in the case in Denver District Court are Alex Joseph, Terris Kintchen, Patrick Rimpel, Jordahni Rimpel, Aliyah Moss and Diana Watt, according to court filings. Each faces a single felony count of attempting to influence a public servant and a single misdemeanor count of perjury. None are Colorado residents.

The accused each signed affidavits affirming that they gathered signatures for Andersen’s petition from people who signed the petition in their presence, the attorney general’s office said.

A spokesman for Weiser told Colorado Politics that none of those charged have yet been arrested.

Watt, a Florida resident who ran the firm’s Colorado projects, told the attorney general’s investigator in an interview that she had signed her name to petitions circulated by a co-worker who’d had to return to Florida for an emergency so was unable to have them notarized, according to an arrest affidavit.

“My name is on some petitions that are very bad,” Watt said in an interview recounted in the affidavit.

After describing how she’d put her name on petitions gathered by someone else, Watt concluded: “So there you go. Go ahead and charge me. I don’t give a (expletive) at this point. That’s what happened. I put my name on Stephanie’s illegitimate petitions. That’s what happened. There you go.”

Watt insisted to the investigator that Grassfire, the company that hired her and the other petition circulators, wasn’t at fault.

“When it became clear to us that a few contractors grievously harmed both our client and our company, we worked with investigators to hold the bad actors accountable,” Sean Bartley, a former owner of Grassfire, told Colorado Politics in a text message. “We commend the secretary of state and attorney general for prosecuting them.”

Grassfire, which has since dissolved as a company, refunded the $67,329 paid by Andersen’s campaign for petition-gathering, Chris Murray, the company’s attorney, told Colorado Politics. The company also reimbursed Andersen’s campaign for legal fees it spent contesting the secretary of state’s decision, bringing the total paid to Andersen’s campaign to more than $110,000, he added.

“As far as Janet Griswold and Phil Weiser and their offices, I believe they’ve done their job here,” Murray said. “These sorts of prosecutions are rare. … I’ve been the lawyer for the Republican Party for a long time, but you have to give credit where credit’s due. I think the investigation here was thorough, and I give their offices a lot of credit for bringing this prosecution. We’ll find out if justice gets done, but now that’s in the hands of the court system.”