We should start by saying that there have been questions raised about elections from both sides of the aisle for decades now.  Rather than speculate, we are using City-provided data, their own security camera video footage and documents (i.e. ballot transit logs) that are owned by and available to the public. We do recognize that, especially with mail-in and drop-box ballot voting, there are serious challenges to ensuring election integrity and avoiding fraud in our elections.  Because we have powerful business interests who are shameless in the lengths to which they will take to buy our leadership, and because we were privy to polling data that dramatically contradicted the 4/4/2023 outcome (namely, two opposing groups' polls that reported the same low response for Wayne Williams putting him at 9% with a 52% unfavorable rating), we felt it was our duty to do a deep dive into the data.  What we have found, thus far, is extremely alarming.  

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Daily Returns Analysis by District

The first giant red flag was seeing voter turnout jumps like 61.18% in district 6 as compared to the 2021 election.  We, initially, thought this was due to population growth, but then looked at 2019 and saw that the turnout was higher than 2021.  Coupled with the fact that the electorate sharply grew by 43,218 from 2019 to 2021 and only 973 from 2021 to 2023, we were troubled.  In addition, 48.65% of the votes came in the last two days of the April 4, 2023 election, when, historically, the last two days produced 34% and 38% in 2021 and 2019 respectively.  

 

City Denies Data Requests & Stalls

Concerned, we immediately began asking our City Clerk for data, and the City's denials and stalling worsened our concerns.  This is OUR data.  We fund these elections, and it should all be immediately handed-over, free of charge (we already pay for it) whenever any registered voter asks to see it.  For those curious, you can see the email exchanges showing how difficult this process has been here.  Even at-large candidate, Kat Gayle, who has joined Integrity Matters as Chief Legal Counsel and, as a candidate, has legal standing to see the return ballot envelopes is being ignored.  This is wrong and needs to be fixed.

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What we have learned so far.  Buckle-up, it is pretty horrifying.

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Deceased people voting? 

When we finally got the database of voters from another entity (the city took 3 weeks to finally respond to our request for data which is immediately e-mailable after each day of voting), we were curious to see if there were any dead voters.  So, we did a very cursory  look (i.e. we are concerned there are more, and, when we have time, we will go look more exhaustively), and found two people who voted after they were deceased.  This prompted us to ask for the signature settings and audits of the ESS MBV1000 ballot envelope machines used as their signatures would have been approved by the two ballot envelope scanning machines used to verify signatures.  Though we have been yet unable to get audit reports for those machines or inspect the ballot return envelopes, we understood that, for this to occur, those settings had to be low.  Sure enough, we were just recently informed that the sensitivity setting is 25 on a scale of 0-99 though the City says the scale isn't linear or a percent trying to minimize the low setting used.  It must mean something to set it at 25 on that scale, and we believe it's a very low sensitivity setting which should be further investigated.  Otherwise, if one had access to, for example, printing ballots (which they do on-demand now) or access to, for example, blank ballots to be printed surreptitiously (i.e. if one were a paid consultant, for example, to the election company, then having those signature sensitivity settings low would enable fake signatures to be easily approved.)  Whether that did or did not occur is superfluous to the point that it should never be so easy to do, under any circumstances. 

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Two individuals, so far, who appear to have not been able to vote are:

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1.  Virginia Ruth Newman:  Ms. Newman's obituary shows her as passing on March 4th, 2023, before the ballots were mailed on March 10th.  The 4/4/2023 Voter Returns Database show with the same voter ID and address as the 1/6/2023 County Voter Database.

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2.  Jennifer Lynn Scott:  Ms. Scott's obituary shows her as passing on February 25th, 2023, before the ballots were mailed on March 10th.  Her obituary identifies her husband as David who is also listed at the same address in the 4/4/2023 Voter Returns Database which matches the voter ID and address of the 1/6/2023 County Voter Registration Database.

 

The low signature setting sensitivity of 25 suggests other illegally cast votes could exist, and the City Clerk's Office failed to prevent them from being cast.

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26,400 Voters Who Never Voted in a City Election Going Back to 2011?

One of the analyses of the Returned Ballot Database showed that 26,400 of the total 109,768 votes were from voters who had never voted in a municipal election going back to 2011.  Nearly 1/4th of all votes cast, were from this "first-time-city-election voter".  It's a jaw-dropping stat.  We wondered if maybe it was because Yemi Mobolade turned-out a youth vote.  So, we calcusted the mean age which was 46.5 years.  Only 5% of these first-time-city-election voters are 30 years of age or younger.  So, it wasn't a "youth turn-out".  We have serious concerns about this stat and encourage Colorado Springs residents to tell everyone they know to check the voter database on our website, especially if they did not vote, to see if their name is listed.  If it is, please email us at integritymatterscos@gmail.com.  It's a stat that is very hard to believe.

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Chain of Custody & the Ballot Transit logs:  14,993 ballots have no chain of custody among many very alarming discoveries

Because the City was so late in responding to our requests for data, it took a team of people to analyze what we have been able to do so far.  We will continue to request data, and strongly encourage citizens and the media to do the same, to correct these copious errors and demand swift action so we never have another municipal election so, at best, carelessly, at worst, nefariously conducted.  In this analysis, we looked at every single transit log and entered the information as it was presented here.  We also conducted pivot table analyses comparing the ballot log data to the City Clerk's own reported totals. 

 

A quick primer on the chain of custody of the ballots:  the chain of custody of ballots is supposed to have two people, typically of differing political parties in November county elections, who take oaths to be "transit judges" to count, document and tightly control the transport of the ballots from the drop-boxes to the City Clerk, where per page 6 of the 2023 Mail Ballot Manual, two City Office Services EMPLOYEES (titled "City Clerk's Signature" on the Ballot Log transmittal form) are to sign for receipt of those ballots from the 2-person transit judge team.  The public pays for the ballot boxes to be videotaped 24/7.  We were able to get copies of the Centennial (Vermejo & Cascade) boxes and the City Administration Building (CAB) which we viewed also for additional insight. 

 

Below is a summary of the problems with the transit logs we have been able to identify thus far:

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• Over the span of the voting period, 14,993 ballots have no transit logs (i.e. chain of custody).  On the last day of voting, 14, 918 of the 35,772 cast lacked Ballot Transmittal Logs.  There are simply no chain of custody records for 42% of the ballots cast that day.

• Slumbering ballots: 

  • 1,199 ballots collected from 14 drop-boxes on 3/13/2023 were not logged into the clerk's office until the following day, 3/14.

  • 17 ballots collected on 3/29/2023 from the UCCS drop-box were not logged into the clerk's office until the following day, 3/30 on the log.  The City Clerk reports a total of 0 ballots on 3/29 at that location.

• Every single transit log had an error be it missing a date, time, illegible signature, no transit seal number, etc.

• 99.7% (718 of the 720) transit logs had illegible signatures making it impossible to transparently track the chain of custody

• The ballot drop-box location was unclear on 6 of the 720 logs representing 211 votes.

• 17 of the 720 transit logs accounting for 2,250 votes were missing signatures

• Transit judges signing for the City Clerk receiving the ballots on 235 of the 720 pick-ups representing 25,057 votes.

• Summary of discrepancies between City Clerk reported totals and the ballot logs supplied by the city:

  • ​3/14, CAB, 96 votes reported, 47 votes in logs

  • 3/29, Bear Creek, 149 votes reported, 22 votes in logs

  • 3/14 Broadmoor Town Center, 83 votes reported, 56 votes in logs

  • 3/29, Chuck Brown Transportation Complex, 54 votes reported, 35 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Citadel Mall North, 26 votes reported, 36 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Senior Center, 51 votes reported, 61 votes in logs

  • 3/31, Citizen Service Center, 427 votes reported, 477 votes in logs

  • 3/29, Centennial Hall, 189 votes reported, 239 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Centennial Hall, 73 votes reported, 72 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Union Town Center, 94 votes reported, 114 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Powers DMV, 147 votes reported, 130 votes in logs

  • 3/27, Union Town Center, 440 votes reported, 585 votes in logs

  • 3/29, Union Town Center, 237 votes reported, 322 votes in logs

  • 3/27, Powers DMV, 390 votes reported, 245 votes in logs

  • 3/29, Powers DMV, 220 votes reported, 135 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Leon Young Sports Complex, 24 votes reported, 10 votes in logs

  • 3/14, PPSC Centennial, 11 votes reported, 6 votes in logs

  • 3/30, PPSC Centennial, 24 votes reported, 17 votes in logs

  • 3/14, PPSC Rampart Range, 19 votes reported, 8 votes in logs

  • 3/14, Tiffany Square, 20 votes reported, 40 votes in logs

  • 3/31, Tiffany Square, 129 votes reported, 54 votes in logs

  • 3/29, UCCS Library, 0 votes reported, 17 votes in logs

  • 3/30, UCCS Library, 40 votes reported, 23 votes in logs

  • 3/31, UCCS Library, 41 votes reported, 36 votes in logs

  • 4/4, CAB, 1967 votes reported, 1169 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Bear Creek Community Garden, 1385 votes reported, 809 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Black Forest Park-n-Ride, 718 votes reported, 509 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Boot Barn Hall, 760 votes reported, 526 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Broadmoor Town Center, 1234 votes reported, 581 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Centennial Hall (both), 2918 votes reported, 3900 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Chuck Brown Transportation Complex, 552 votes reported, 335 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Centennial Hall (both), 2918 votes reported, 1950 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Citadel Mall North, 806 votes reported, 552 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Citizen Service Center (EPC), 5307 votes reported, 1678 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Cottonwood Rec Center, 1080 votes reported, 735 votes in logs

  • 4/4, First & Main, 1692 votes reported, 1228 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Fort Carson, 123 votes reported, 33 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Leon Young Sports Cmplx, 459 votes reported, 120 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Powers DMV (EPC), 1383 votes reported, 815 votes in logs

  • 4/4, PP Regional Development, 236 votes reported, 141 votes in logs

  • 4/4, PPLD East Library, 3729 votes reported, 2612 votes in logs

  • 4/4, PPLD Library 21c, 2948 votes reported, 2189 votes in logs

  • 4/4, PPSC Centennial, 583 votes reported, 385 votes in logs

  • 4/4, PPSC Rampart Range, 266 votes reported, 61 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Rocky Mtn Calvary, 822 votes reported, 253 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Senior Center, 851 votes reported, 851 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Tiffany Square, 866 votes reported, 563 votes in logs

  • 4/4, UCCS Library, 564 votes reported, 210 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Union Town Center (EPC), 3021 votes reported, 2251 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Vista Grande Baptist Church, 1182 votes reported, 298 votes in logs

  • 4/4, Wilson Ranch Pool, 320 votes reported, 224 votes in logs

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What we have learned thus far from our examination of the ballot drop-box video from the City Administration Building (CAB) and Centennial Hall - Vermejo/Centennial Hall - Cascade ballot drop-boxes (we had to pay about $1,000 and spend easily 60 hours on this nonsense):

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• Many pick-ups for which the City provided no transit logs.  For example, on 4/4/2023, the last day of voting, the CORA requested security camera video at the City Administration shows five ballot drop box collections. Four have Ballot Transmittal Logs. The City Clerk's Office claims 1,967 ballots were collected at this location. However, the security camera video shows an undocumented collection at 10:25 AM.  The difference between total of  the documented number of ballots and the total reported by the city is 798 ballots.  The below video clearly shows that 798 were not collected that time. 

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