It’s another day in American Dystopia, and today we are traveling down to El Paso County, Colorado.

a routine test for fidelity

Four candidates have paid the money for a machine recount of the Colorado Primary Election, including Secretary of State candidate Tina Peters whose inclusion means the recount will take place in all 64 counties.

The recount jurisdiction for two of the other candidates, County Clerk and Recorder candidate Peter Lupia and Coroner candidate Dr. Rae Ann Weber, are under the purview of current El Paso Clerk and Recorder Chuck Broerman. Recounts for State Senate candidate Lynda Zamora Wilson, along with Peters, will be overseen by Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Thank goodness for checks and balances!

Just kidding. No one in Colorado has any power over or oversight of Colorado elections aside from the Secretary, and my sources tell me that Caleb Thornton arrived in Colorado Springs this afternoon. I’m sure Broerman held Thornton’s gender-neutral man bag while the state designee attempted to appear competent at something. (Update: I’m told the bag is actually quite femine.)

Today started off with Logic and Accuracy Testing and, as we first reported on Conservative Daily this morning, the test yielded a ballot rejection rate of ~57%, or roughly 2,260 out of 4,000 ballots tested were rejected.

This news broke while Joe was closing the show in prayer, and Apollo and I enjoyed breaking the news to him after the “Amen.”

the official story

According to a source who attended the Secretary of State’s call on the recount process this morning, Colorado rules state that the recount must adjudicate every ballot with an “undervote.”

An undervote is when the entire ballot is not filled out completely – some races are left blank. This rule does not apply to the primary or general elections so, the narrative goes, in a recount the result of the high error rate “is expected.”

The pain means it's working.

According to people in the room, the high error rate was not expected.

Officials scrambled to call in additional judges and watchers given the high volume of rejected ballots, all of which need to be adjudicated for each of seven machines being tested. The reported estimate is that the Logic and Accuracy Testing is going to take 26 hours to complete given the high error rate.

At press time, I am told they’ve only completed three of seven scanners, and they will attempt one more before calling it a night and continuing tomorrow. Original expectations were that this test would take only a few hours.

is this even a legitimate test?

Since they’re such sticklers for rules – a good thing until the rule maker is a tyrant – let’s talk about the rules and statutes governing this process.

According to the Colorado Revised Statute:

“Prior to any recount, the canvass board shall choose at random and test voting devices used in the candidate race, ballot issue, or ballot question that is the subject of the recount. The board shall use the voting devices it has selected to conduct a comparison of the machine count of the ballots counted on each such voting device for the candidate race, ballot issue, or ballot question to the corresponding manual count of the VOTER VERIFIED paper records.” (Emphasis added)

CRS 1-10.5-102 Sec 3 Paragraph "a"

According to people closely watching this upside clown rodeo, this statute is being violated.

First, they are not manually counting the ballots and, according to a source watching this process like a hawk, “Ashe, everything they are doing is on a computer screen.”

Second, and equally egregious, they are not counting – manual or otherwise – VOTER VERIFIED PAPER RECORDS. They are counting test ballots.

They are counting the SAME “deck” of test ballots that they used for Logic and Accuracy Testing prior to the Primary. That activity – that test – is prescribed in the Colorado Election Rules 8 CCR 1505-1 (11.3) as the methodology for testing the machines prior to an election. But today’s activities are not testing the machines prior to an election.

They are testing prior to a recount.

As stated in the above statue (the one that governs recounts which should trump the rules where the test ballots are found), that test must be conducted using VOTER VERIFIED PAPER RECORDS with the counts compared to a manual recount. According to the people watching, none of that is happening.

"the canvass board shall choose"

Since the statue mentions the Canvass Board, let’s check in with the Canvass Board in El Paso County. I obtained a copy of the “Minority Report” from one of the Canvass Board members in El Paso, and it doesn’t yield a whole lot of confidence. Here’s an inside glimpse of the nation’s “Gold Standard of Elections.”

This story is developing. Stay tuned.