One hand es the other.

Bipar­ti­san teams trans­port, ver­i­fy, open, sort, count and store Colorado’s bal­lots — all in secure rooms with win­dows through which any­one can .

Elec­tion judges and com­put­ers check each vote and sig­na­ture against state reg­istries before they’re tab­u­lat­ed and stashed by the hun­dreds in card­board box­es, num­bered and dated.

No sin­gle per­son or par­ty con­trols any por­tion of the process. Checks, bal­ances and redun­dan­cies guard against fraud, inter­fer­ence and innocu­ous errors.

Colorado’s mail-in vot­ing sys­tem is as safe as it gets, local and nation­al experts, elec­tion judges, Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats agree — despite efforts by Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and oth­ers to ques­tion the secu­ri­ty of vot­ing by mail.

Col­orado is one of just five states employ­ing an auto­mat­ic vote-by-mail elec­tion sys­tem and many now won­der how the remain­ing 45 and the Dis­trict of Colum­bia will han­dle the Novem­ber elec­tion as the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic continues.

More and more eyes are turn­ing to Den­ver to see how it’s done.

The ballots

Alton Dil­lard nod­ded with appar­ent sat­is­fac­tion as he ed a man lug a red met­al lock box into a secure room inside the Den­ver Clerk and Recorder’s Office down­town dur­ing the June 30 primary.

It’s the kind of event for which Dil­lard, the office’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er, wears a suit. He has ed all sorts of elec­tions roll by since 2005 and takes pride in under­stand­ing the nuances.

Each of the state’s 64 coun­ty clerks run elec­tions accord­ing to guide­lines set out by Sec­re­tary of State Jena Gris­wold and state law. There are minor dif­fer­ences among coun­ties, but by and large the sys­tem is the same statewide.

There are thou­sands of dif­fer­ent bal­lots for each elec­tion because school, munic­i­pal, state­house and oth­er polit­i­cal dis­tricts over­lap each oth­er in many dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions. Each coun­ty has dif­fer­ent mea­sures and can­di­dates but also dif­fer­ent types of paper, dif­fer­ent col­ors, thick­ness­es and more, Gris­wold said.

The var­i­ous details would be near­ly impos­si­ble to imi­tate should a bad actor want to sway an elec­tion using false bal­lots, the elect­ed Demo­c­rat said.

Denver’s bal­lots are print­ed in Wash­ing­ton State, Dil­lard said, and trucked to Col­orado in locked semis with track­ing pucks.

“That’s how they know the bal­lots didn’t go across the Bering Strait and into Rus­sia,” Dil­lard said.

Coun­ty clerks and bipar­ti­san teams will often arrive at their post offices to as the trucks are unlocked and the bal­lots are dumped into the mail stream to be deliv­ered to reg­is­tered vot­ers across the state.

Who can vote, and how

One of the most impor­tant secu­ri­ty fea­tures of Colorado’s elec­tion sys­tem is the vot­er reg­istry and its dili­gent upkeep, said for­mer Sec­re­tary of State Wayne Williams, a Repub­li­can who led the launch of Colorado’s mail-in vot­ing sys­tem in 2013.

The Sec­re­tary of State’s Office checks with the post office, Colorado’s Depart­ment of Pub­lic Health and Envi­ron­ment and Depart­ment of Cor­rec­tions month­ly, Gris­wold said, to ensure that if any­body moves out of state, dies or is impris­oned, they’ll be removed from the reg­istry and will no longer receive a ballot.

The fre­quen­cy of the checks increas­es before an elec­tion, said Steve Hurl­bert, a spokesper­son for Griswold.

Eli­gi­ble vot­ers receive their bal­lots about three weeks before a giv­en elec­tion. They can cast their votes and return the bal­lots by mail up to eight days before Elec­tion Day or they can sub­mit them into a drop box or clerk’s office until 7 p.m. on Elec­tion Night.

Bipar­ti­san teams col­lect votes from Denver’s 37 drop box­es dai­ly, lock­ing the box­es con­tain­ing the bal­lots and label­ing them by loca­tion before deliv­er­ing them down­town. On Elec­tion Night, the teams repeat the pro­ce­dure, clos­ing the drop box­es pre­cise­ly when polls close.

Often vot­ers drop their bal­lots in the wrong coun­ty, but Dil­lard said even that is man­age­able: “We do have a process to swap out with oth­er coun­ty clerks, and they get counted.”

Between 3% and 4% of Col­oradans still pre­fer to vote in per­son, which they can do at their coun­ty clerk’s office and oth­er des­ig­nat­ed vot­ing loca­tions, Hurl­bert said.

Checking signatures

Whether bal­lots are received ear­ly or on Elec­tion Night, they go through the same process, begin­ning with ensur­ing that each bal­lot was sub­mit­ted by the vot­er to whom it was mailed.

Incom­ing bal­lots are fed through a machine that checks the sig­na­ture on the enve­lope against each voter’s on-file sig­na­ture. Those sig­na­tures are col­lect­ed as peo­ple reg­is­ter to vote, when receiv­ing or renew­ing their driver’s licens­es, when they vot­ed in pre­vi­ous elec­tions and more, said Joce­lyn Bucaro, Denver’s direc­tor of elections.

“We have many, many, many dif­fer­ent sig­na­tures from you as a vot­er to com­pare your sig­na­ture against,” Bucaro said.

The machine kicks out envelopes if the sig­na­tures aren’t close enough to those on file. Then a bipar­ti­san team of judges — spe­cial­ly trained for the task — steps up to exam­ine the sig­na­tures fur­ther. Those teams can either accept the sig­na­tures and approve the bal­lots to be count­ed or set aside mismatches.

The clerk’s office con­tacts vot­ers whose sig­na­tures were not accept­ed — or who for­got to sign their bal­lots — and gives them eight days to resolve, or “cure,” the discrepancy.

Of the 211,626 bal­lots cast by mail or drop box in the June 30 pri­ma­ry, only 3,862 — or 1.8% — were reject­ed because of a mis­match or lack of signature. 

Bal­lots with mis­matched sig­na­tures that aren’t cured by vot­ers are turned over to dis­trict attor­neys to inves­ti­gate fur­ther, just in case, Bucaro said. But near­ly all dis­crep­an­cies come from sim­ple issues, she said. Some­times peo­ple print their names rather than sign, some­times one spouse acci­den­tal­ly signs the other’s enve­lope, and the sig­na­ture of aging vot­ers can dete­ri­o­rate over time.

Envelopes bear­ing sig­na­tures that do match — the vast major­i­ty — are sent into a dif­fer­ent room where bipar­ti­san teams of elec­tion judges open the envelopes and remove the bal­lots inside.

Each voter’s name and address is sep­a­rat­ed from their vote and will “nev­er meet again dur­ing any part of the process,” Dil­lard said.

The envelopes go into stor­age, where they will remain for more than two years.

Counting and tabulating

Mov­ing down the line of elec­tion judges, the bal­lots are imprint­ed with a unique and ran­dom 10-dig­it num­ber and fed through anoth­er machine that tab­u­lates the votes.

Until polls close, they can be count­ed but not tab­u­lat­ed, Dil­lard said. This means judges enter the votes into the count­ing machine, but the results aren’t applied to any giv­en race.

“We don’t know who’s lead­ing, who’s behind, which elec­tion is doing what until we hit that but­ton at 7 p.m. on Elec­tion Night,” he said.

As the bal­lots are being fed, some­times they are too gar­bled or man­gled for the com­put­er to read the votes, so it sends an image to bipar­ti­san teams of adju­di­cat­ing judges to review.

Those judges shuf­fle around the room in red vests with a par­ty affil­i­a­tion pin on their chest. Though there are even num­bers of Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats, the atmos­phere bears no resem­blance to the cur­rent nation­al polit­i­cal cli­mate. The judges smile and joke while also tak­ing their job seriously.

“We’re mak­ing every vote count,” said Demo­c­ra­t­ic Judge MaryAnne Thomp­son, who said she began judg­ing elec­tions around 2005.

Anoth­er judge, unaf­fil­i­at­ed 19-year-old Ulysses Atke­son, said he began work as a judge before he was old enough to vote and now he’s hooked.

“The peo­ple are great, and the elec­tions nev­er stop,” Atke­son said with a laugh.

Regard­less of par­ty, the Den­ver elec­tion judges and employ­ees The Den­ver Post spoke with June 30 shook their heads when asked about the doubts cast on elec­tion secu­ri­ty at the nation­al level.

“That tells me these peo­ple don’t know or under­stand what the process is,” said Steve Sharp, a full-time employ­ee of the clerk’s office. “I say come down here and us and try to find a flaw.”

Sharp smiled as he looked toward the long table filled with com­put­ers for adju­di­cat­ing judges.

Some­times the judges will notice that a per­son con­sis­tent­ly used an X to mark their pre­ferred can­di­date rather than fill­ing in cir­cles as direct­ed. Or per­haps the cir­cle for one choice is only 80% filled while that for anoth­er can­di­date has what’s called in the busi­ness a “hes­i­ta­tion mark.”

As long as the judges can clear­ly see how a per­son intend­ed to vote, they can tab­u­late the results accord­ing­ly, Dil­lard said.

The judges work through bal­lots in batch­es of about 800, and Thomp­son esti­mat­ed between 5% to 10% have to be adjudicated.

The clerk’s office updates elec­tion results online every 90 min­utes begin­ning when polls close at 7 p.m., Dil­lard said. The teams typ­i­cal­ly go until about midnight.

“Then we have our crews come back with fresh eyes, fresh brains in the morn­ing,” he said.

The process can con­tin­ue for days, depend­ing on the num­ber of bal­lots cast and how many of them arrive on the final day.

Fin­ished bal­lots are filed by the teams into box­es, dat­ed and stored securely.

Through the process, there is no real oppor­tu­ni­ty for out­side actors to change the results on a sin­gle bal­lot, let alone enough to sway an elec­tion, Bucaro said. The com­put­ers aren’t con­nect­ed to the inter­net, for one thing.

“So unless some­one is phys­i­cal­ly here — and we have video sur­veil­lance and key card access — there is no way any­one could inter­fere with the elec­tion tab­u­la­tion sys­tem,” she said.

The process is so secure, Den­ver Coun­ty Clerk Paul López said, that not even he has access to the count rooms.

“It’s safe, it’s secure, it’s trans­par­ent, it has been test­ed, it’s tried, it’s true and it’s pan­dem­ic proof,” López said.

Checking their work

The vot­ing and bal­lot tab­u­la­tion process con­tains built-in redun­dan­cies and safe­guards, but Col­orado offi­cials built in at least two more.

The first is a risk-lim­it­ing audit which takes place about two weeks after each elec­tion. The Sec­re­tary of State’s Office requires coun­ty clerks — through bipar­ti­san teams of elec­tion judges — to phys­i­cal­ly find a spe­cif­ic num­ber of bal­lots and check those paper results against the votes tab­u­lat­ed by the computers.

The bal­lots that must be locat­ed are dic­tat­ed by the ran­dom 10-dig­it num­bers imprint­ed on them much ear­li­er in the process, Dil­lard said.

“It’s com­par­ing what the humans are read­ing against what the machine read,” Bucaro said. “It’s mak­ing sure they match and that we know the machine read them correctly.”

If mis­takes are found, the process is fol­lowed by addi­tion­al rounds of audit­ing. Too many mis­takes could trig­ger a full hand recount. But mul­ti­ple rounds of audits are rare, Dil­lard said.

For the June 30 pri­ma­ry, Griswold’s office set audit stan­dards such that if there was an error in the count there would be a 96% chance it would be dis­cov­ered dur­ing the audit.

For Den­ver, that meant judges had to find and check 555 bal­lots, more than twice the amount required by the next largest county’s audit, Dil­lard said.

“Den­ver has always nailed it first round with no dis­crep­an­cies,” Dil­lard said.

Cas­es of fraud are incred­i­bly rare, Bucaro, Dil­lard and López agreed. It’s some­thing clerks look for and seri­ous­ly guard against, but they’ve nev­er noticed a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of fraud causes.

In 2018, Gris­wold said, 0.0027% of 2,566,784 bal­lots cast statewide were referred to dis­trict attor­neys for fur­ther investigation.

The con­ser­v­a­tive Her­itage Foun­da­tion has record­ed only 14 cas­es of elec­tion-relat­ed offens­es in Col­orado since 2005.

Williams said he recalled one study of Col­orado, Ore­gon, Wash­ing­ton and two East­ern states where about 38 peo­ple were caught attempt­ing to vote in mul­ti­ple states. But those peo­ple were caught and pros­e­cut­ed, he said.

In espe­cial­ly tight races, those votes could make a dif­fer­ence, Williams said. But that’s why Col­orado has so many safe­guards and redundancies.

“I am con­fi­dent in our sys­tem,” he said.

After the audit, bipar­ti­san teams return once more for what is called a canvass.

“They lit­er­al­ly just go through the entire elec­tion,” Dil­lard said. “How many peo­ple turned out in this precinct? How many bal­lots did we reject because they were unsigned? How many unsigned bal­lots were fixed? How many bal­lots were disqualified?”

After the can­vass — and no more than 22 days after an elec­tion — the results are cer­ti­fied, mean­ing they’re accu­rate and set in stone, Dil­lard said.

But still there’s one more safe­guard: State law requires clerks to keep the bal­lots and envelopes, stored and secured, for 25 months. Just in case.