out everywhere it’s been implemented. There was an increase in Utah; they fol- lowed closely after us, and that’s a very red state. Nebraska has twelve counties that now vote by mail, and their turnout tripled in the primaries and went up in the general as well. That’s in a very red state and a very rural state, where people often live very far away from where a polling place may be. So it meets people where they are, and there is no evidence that it benefi ts one party or another. In 2013, we also created same-day regis- tration and got rid of the outdated deadlines. [Previously] we had a thirty-day registration deadline. By modernizing that, it’s not like there are people new to the state using that in a signifi cant way; it’s mostly in-state vot- ers moving to new places, and now they are enfranchised in the place where they live. When we fi rst implemented same-day registration, for the 2014 midterm elections, one more Republican used it statewide than Democrats, almost an even split in terms of percentage. Are there advantages to voting by mail during a pandemic? Yes. When you don’t have thousands of polling places that need to be staffed and manned, and voting booths that have to be cleaned [after every use] — all that in-person structure — you need less staff. One of the top issues for election offi cials around the country is fi nding enough quali- fi ed people to be election judges. And with the implementation of the new model, depending on the county, some coun- ties saw about a 60 to 70 percent reduction in the labor they needed to run an election. Can you address the idea that voting by mail allows fraud? The Colorado Republican Party platform seeks to limit mail-in voting. voter registration. We already had online voter registration, but there was room to make further improvements, because we had some outdated deadlines, and the process was not modern. And I, along with a few county clerks — all women, initially, by the way — we all said, Wait a minute: Eighty-plus percent of voters are requesting a ballot by mail. And if we reform and send a ballot to all and keep in-person voting at vote centers, we can improve service and cut costs. So all those factors led to the creation of 1303. Amazingly, now, it’s nine years old, almost exactly. That date is stuck in my head because my son was born that April. When I went into labor, the bill was 150 pages, and I took my copy to the hospital, had Kenton, and that same day, they were fi nalizing the bill that would get fi led. My deputy called me, and I answered, and she said, “What do you think about this change?” And I said, “It sounds good. By the way, I just had Kenton, a few hours ago.” She said, “What are you doing answering the phone?” What counties led the way in terms of vot- ing innovations that were adopted statewide? A lot of great things were happening in various counties. One thing we led on was ballot tracking. Ballot TRACE — we had created that in 2009, so that system was in place four years before we passed this bill. Jefferson County had started to do more drop boxes, and we followed suit on that. We had also digitized the registration process and created an app for voter registration. How did the advent of voting by mail and these other reforms change voting trends? And does voting by mail benefi t one party or another? It doesn’t benefi t one side or the other. On vote by mail, every study that’s been done shows that it ben- efi ts Republicans and Democrats alike. Sometimes, depending on the state, Independent turnout goes up a little, and that’s more because Inde- pendents don’t get the same level of outreach from the two parties as the two parties do for their members. Some of the other benefi ts of voting by mail: It does create a more informed electorate. People have more time to research issues and candidates at home. Ballot issues can be long, and judges — I mean, most people don’t know those names. Confronted with them, we saw people were under-voting, or not voting for a lot of those things, because they didn’t know. One out- come we have seen is an increase in how far down the ballot people will go. People go farther down the ballot when they have time to research and think about the issues. And there has been an increase in turn- Embattled Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is now running for Secretary of State. But a lot of this can be tracked back over many years, and many of the same bad actors pop up. The “Stop the Steal” website was pur- chased in the fall of 2016, because people thought Trump wouldn’t win then. So this all started before the 2016 election. Right after 2016, you didn’t hear so much about it, after the candidate they wanted to win was elected. You trace it back, a lot of this The minute election processes get po- liticized, we have a problem. There have been examples of this over time. I think of Florida 2000 and the aftermath of that election. Some of the same purveyors of the “Stop the Steal” this time were on the ground in Florida in 2000. But that election was far closer — it was down to one state, it was within a very slim mar- gin — versus 2020, which was not that close. disinformation, mal-information, and lies and conspiracy theories, have been driven by Trump and allies and the folks who want to drive a wedge, drive distrust into the process. I’ve always been an Independent; I call it like it is. I would call out the other side if they were doing this and spreading misin- formation. Not all Republicans believe the conspiracy stuff. But there are a signifi cant group of people who are listening to this and don’t care about facts. You’re totally entitled to your own opinions, but the minute we are creating facts or we can no longer have a conversation about factual evidence, we’re in a very challenging situation. And the other thing is, most people don’t understand how elections work. People fi ll out their ballot and assume, poof! — there’s an election result, when there’s a lot of detail that goes into the process. It’s highly regu- lated and it’s highly secure, and the majority of Americans don’t understand how it works. So it was sort of easy to spread a lie. Can you describe what makes the process secure? It’s a highly regulated process. Elec- tions were deemed critical infrastructure in December of 2016, which means the De- partment of Homeland Security and key cyber-security agencies have started to set up structures to ensure that elections are secure, just like our electrical grid. The other thing that I would say about elections generally is that we can always continuously improve, and if we are not con- tinuously improving and continuously putting up our defenses for the next threat, then we’re not doing what we should be doing. There are examples of bipartisan legisla- tion that has been passed federally, and that is important, so there is a federal, state, and local aspect to this, but elections are gener- ally run at the local level — by counties, by cities, sometimes elected clerks, sometimes appointed, sometimes hired. There are 9,000 local election offi ces. And there are going to be some bad apples. We have an example in Colorado with a clerk who wasn’t following the law, and now she’s being held account- able. Law enforcement is dealing with that. In terms of voter fraud, one of the reasons that systematic fraud can’t be done, or is so diffi cult to do, is the number of multiple factors and multiple touchpoints and mul- tiple people and multiple systems that would have to be coordinated to make that happen. Election systems, voting tabu- lation systems, voting machines are not connected to the internet. There are elements of the voting process that are, such as our voter registration system, but ballot tabu- lation systems in Colorado — none of that is connected to the internet. We also have advanced auditing measures. We do risk-limiting audits after each election. Our system has been audited more than any other in the country, because in addition to the reforms we did on the front end, we added audits to identify any disrup- tions or things that shouldn’t be happening. And there are other touchpoints to elimi- nate fraud. With vote by mail, ballots can’t be forwarded. So if you continued on page 16 15 westword.com | CONTENTS | LETTERS | NEWS | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | CAFE | MUSIC | WESTWORD APRIL 14-20, 2022 TINA PETERS FACEBOOK EVAN SEMÓN
