With mail-in voting delivering on the promise of expanding the democratic process, Amber McReynolds is ready to stamp out election-fraud rumors.
With conspiracy theories about elections
But there were a few folks who cared about putting the voters first and doing whatever we could to serve voters effectively, and those of us that cared about that ultimately moved up in the organization and were part of the change. What we often see is — and we’re seeing this now — we see legislators only talk about security, or only talk about accessibility. But all those values matter equally: fairness, accessibility, security, transparency, equity and reliability. We have to balance those objectives when we’re creating policies, and also when we’re trying to create a process that voters can be proud of, that they can be excited about — and in my mind, that does not involve waiting in a five-hour line.
We didn’t have a system for the agents to look up where a ballot was, so we looked at that: Okay, is there a technological solution to this? At that time, the postal service had just created what was called an intelligent barcode, meaning tracking information on an envelope and using scan data at various points in the process. They could see where a piece of mail was. It was premised on the tracking of packages by FedEx or by the postal service.
When vote by mail started to expand, Oregon was first, Washington second, we were closely third. But it was driven by voters. When we said you can request a mail ballot, first you had to sign up every election. And then once we said you can sign up for all future elections, we saw almost 80 percent of Colorado voters opt in. They chose it themselves. It wasn’t government saying, “You have to do it this way.” Voters were choosing that option; they were choosing that service.
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.
Some of the other benefits 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 outcome we have seen is an increase in how far down the ballot people will go.
And with the implementation of the new model, depending on the county, some counties saw about a 60 to 70 percent reduction in the labor they needed to run an election.The minute election processes get politicized, 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.
And the other thing is, most people don’t understand how elections work. People fill 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 regulated 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.It’s a highly regulated process.
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 disruptions or things that shouldn’t be happening. Then voter fraud — individual situations — it is incredibly difficult for voters to get away with it, because we have all those touchpoints. One case, Steve Curtis, who used to be the Republican party state chair and was then a radio host for a while, in 2016 he was claiming there was going to be massive fraud. Well, he lives in Weld County, and Weld County caught him trying to cast his wife’s ballot. And they did that with these processes we have in place.
But ballot tracking provides immediate notification and gives voters visibility to know if something goes awry. The ballot was mailed on this date, I haven’t received it yet, the postal system has no further tracking information on it — they can see that.What elements of the processes that you helped put into place in Colorado are you now helping to implement on the national scale?
We might see some of these folks who are passing policies that are driven by the conspiracies and lies around elections passing policies that are a disservice to their own electorate start to rethink. I think in the midterms, we will see how turnout is; we will see how engaged people are. I think that kind of approach to transparency is a good path for election officials across the country to approach elections. Because it’s hard to combat a very transparent process.
The attack on Dominion Voting Systems, which is based here in Colorado, their lawsuits are one of the only accountability mechanisms happening at the moment. They were attacked and defamed in a deliberate way to destroy their brand and destroy their name. But we also need to make sure that election offices have the funding they need to secure their operations, run their processes and have sustainable funding for elections over time; elections have been underfunded for decades. So making sure election offices have the resources they need to do their jobs and protect their offices. Their staff really matters.
Independents now make up about 45 percent of the country. In Colorado, it is well over 40 percent. So Independents are a growing group, and that trend has been happening for a long period of time. I think people are feeling left out of the two parties, or not engaged, or they can make their own decisions and they don’t need to have a party tell them what decision to make.
When you’ve got 45 percent Independents, it kind of puts the parties at risk to have a closed process. The assemblies — it’s this tiny percentage of voters who participate, and it kind of puts you at risk.
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