With just under one month until the November coordinated election, the El Paso County Clerk and Recorder’s Office announced a series of new technologies designed to safeguard election integrity.

Residents will also have the opportunity this week to observe the county’s  public logic and accuracy test on all its ballot counting equipment to ensure each machine processed and tabulated ballots correctly.

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According to a presentation to the El Paso County Board of Commissioners by Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker Tuesday, staff has just finished equipping each of the county’s 39 ballot boxes with brand-new electric and solar-powered camera technology that can livestream ballot box activity to the county’s website.

While boxes have previously required surveillance under Colorado law, “archaic” cameras only reliant on electricity complicated where boxes could be installed in more rural places like Cascade, and retrieving massive video files could take weeks, Schleiker previously told The Gazette.

“All 39 ballot boxes can be viewed by all of our citizens online. We’re embedding those links on the website (so that) folks can sit there and take a look at what’s (going on at) the ballot boxes,” Schleiker told commissioners.

Residents can watch a demonstration of the livestream process at the county commissioner meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 17, Schleiker said.

Schleiker said the county has also contracted with data analytics and credit reporting giant Experian in January to get ahead of “undeliverable ballots” and save taxpayer money.

In the past, not knowing that an individual had recently died or had moved out of the county until ballots were returned to sender could rack up costs, as each ballot costs about $8 to mail, Schleiker said. Under the new contract with Experian, the county sent about 460,000 voter files – not including confidential or overseas voters’ files – from the county’s voter registration database to match against the most current resident permanent address data held by Experian to help identify voters who no longer live in the county.

The county was then able to contact residents with mismatched current addresses and learn who to eliminate from its voter database.

“This was extremely successful (because) we have a lot of citizens here in the county that are here for a temporary time frame, like being active duty military,” he said. “The bottom line is that it cleans up our voter rolls (and) saves taxpayer money.”

A third move by the county to ensure election integrity was to adopt a new mail assembly and reconciliation system (MARS) that can track individual ballots from the ballot vendor – K&H Printers out of Everett, Wash. – to the postal service truck location and into the voter’s mailbox.

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Ballots will be mailed on Monday, Schleiker said. If residents do not receive ballots by Oct. 26, they are encouraged to contact his office, where staff can use MARS to let the voter know exactly where their ballot is in the delivery process.

The system can also provide ballot count information by ballot type and precinct, as well as track ballot delivery by total number of received ballots, zip code and total number of ballots delivered per day.

Ahead of ballots being mailed out, the Clerk and Recorder’s Office will be conducting its “integrity check” on its ballot counting equipment, when it will run 8,000 ballots, of which officials know the outcome, through the machines to test accuracy.

The test began Tuesday morning and is expected to run through Thursday.

Residents can observe the process from the Peterson counting room, No. 2203, on the second floor of the Citizens Service Center, 1675 W. Garden of the Gods Road, in Colorado Springs.

Schleiker recently received a complaint from resident group Integrity Matters alleging “anomalies” in some of the ballot returns for the city’s April 4 municipal election, such as instances of two dead residents casting ballots; no ballot box video coverage for 42% of the votes cast; several concerns over ballot chain of custody, including nearly 400 votes with no transit logs, errors and missing or illegible signatures on hundreds of transit logs; and nearly 30 instances where the group claims the city clerk reported ballot totals that don’t match transit logs, among others.

The El Paso County Clerk’s Office does not have jurisdiction to hear complaints related entirely to a home-rule municipal election, Schleiker wrote in an email to county staff regarding the issue, The Gazette previously reported.

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