This info is from Chaffee County’s Dominion Voting Systems for the 2023 election. They use two main sources: the Cast Vote Record (CVR) and the Dominion Voting Systems ballot scanner log. The CVR shows details about votes on each ballot, and the scanner log tells when they scan batches of ballots.
Mail-in ballots are collected until there are enough for scanning. Then they scan about 50 at a time.
Let’s look at the Adriane Kuhn versus Aaron Stephens race in Ward 2 for Salida City Council.
What’s interesting is that Kuhn was winning until election night when a lot of votes came in for Stephens. Why did this happen? Were Stephens voters mostly waiting until the last minute?
The chart below shows the election night change. It displays the total votes for each candidate in the race by scanner batch. Kuhn is ahead until the last ballots are scanned on election night.
By 4:05 pm, on election day, 166 out of 207 batches had been scanned, which is 80% of all the batches and Kuhn is ahead by 5 votes
At 8:12 pm, on election night, they scan the last 20% of the batches and Kuhn loses by 23 votes.
Let’s check out the race between Jackie Berndt and Alisa Pappenfort in Ward 3 for Salida City Council. Jackie started falling behind around batch 47, scanned on November 2nd at 4:23 pm.
The leveling off of total votes at the end of the chart is because most votes scanned then came from Buena Vista, where people didn’t vote in the Salida races.
Notice how, around batch 90 (scanned on Nov 6th at 12:18 pm), there’s a change in Alisa’s total votes. What could be the reason for this change? It seems kind of unusual.
Let’s look at the race between Wayles Martin and Ben Gilling for Salida City Treasurer.
Again, the leveling off of total votes at the end is because most votes scanned then came from Buena Vista, where people didn’t vote in the Salida races.
People consistently prefer Gilling. Unlike other races, such as Kuhn versus Stephens and Berndt versus Pappenfort, there are no sudden changes in the way votes are going.
Finally, let’s look at the three races for the Buena Vista school board: Brett Mitchell versus Casey Martin, Mallory Brooks versus Montana Brown, and Paula Dylan versus Trinda Windle.
In these three races, there are no sudden changes in how votes are going. This is different from what we saw in the Kuhn versus Stephens and the Berndt versus Pappenfort races, making those races more interesting and curious.
Rumor has it that PT Wood did a late “get out the vote” campaign for Aaron Stephens, not sure what date.
PT Wood got hacked off when an edited version of the Ark Valley Voice debate video was posted on Aaron’s Facebook page. It showed how poorly Aaron performed in the debate.
PT considered this trolling.
I submitted a CORA request for the key card access log for the election ballot area for the period from October 23, 2023, to November 22, 2023.
There were 247 entries from 10/23 to 11/21. Election day was 11/7.
Name # of entries Notes
Adam Miller 1 Entered at 4:13 pm on 11/2
Barb Tidd 5
Election Judge 24 Latest enter time of all entries = 10:16 pm on 11/7
Jason Lapointe 40
Kelli Grauer 1 Entered at 11:30am on 11/7
Kit Kuester 5
Lori Mitchell 81
Shilo DeLeo 90 Earliest enter time of all entries = 6:58 am on 11/7
I found it a little strange that Adam and Kelli entered the room only once. Is Adam a Sheriff? The earliest and latest enter times were around 7am and 10pm; nothing strange there. The “Election Judge” name is strange. Was there only one election judge that had a key? Were there multiple Election Judge key cards?
A victory for HICCUP!
After pointing out to the Chaffee County Commissioners that the chain of custody had been broken on the 2022 election ballot boxes, the 2023 logs are okay. Two signatures are required each time a box is opened, and that’s what happened in the 2023 election.
HICCUP paid $125 for the records, that the County said would take 5 hours to prepare (excessive). You can download the file here:
Here are the final 2023 election reports from the Clerk.
Click on the links below and press the Big Blue “Download” button to view the file.
Abstract 2023
In person voters
RLA file
Mail in Ballot Voters 2023
Statement of Ballots