The purpose of this report is to respond to recent assertions about the ballot counting process at our COGOP State Assembly on 6Apr2024.  While most of the heavy lifting for the State Assembly has been done by other committees and volunteers, the comments and misinformation circulating compelled me to weigh in on the discussion. 

Bottom Line Up Front:  We will have hand-counted paper ballots at the Colorado GOP State Assembly in Pueblo, Colorado on 6April2024.  The hand count will prevail as the official count.  In addition, there will be two 1970s-technology optical readers from Scantron used as a preliminary vote count procedure. 

It is important to briefly recall the timeline leading to this State Assembly.  The COGOP was in financial disarray when Chairman Dave Williams took the helm 11 months ago, and it required significant efforts just to reach equilibrium.  Legal battles (e.g., keeping President Trump on the ballot) also consumed time and money.  Given those realities, there was not sufficient time nor funds to design and procure the necessary items we would all prefer to utilize for hand counting ballots.  In spite of these limiting factors, there will be hand-counted paper ballots at the 2024 COGOP State Assembly. 

However, this ad hoc, expedient method of hand-counting may be more time intensive than, for example, a full-sized Maricopa County Audit setup that might have been implemented.  There are also time constraints associated with the event location, so should the voting procedure and the hand-counting take longer than scheduled, additional fees will have to be paid, and people traveling from across the state may be inconvenienced.

For these reasons, old-style optical readers, first fashioned in the 1970s, will be used to provide a preliminary count. Many people will remember these machines from grade school, when we took multiple choice tests and filled in the bubbles with a soft lead pencil. 

Remember, however, the hand count will prevail.

My Assessment of The Way Forward:

Our party is moving in the right direction on hand-counted ballots.  And it is a SEISMIC shift in the right direction – providing fully 90% of what the grassroots wants.  There are no electronic, radio transmitter clickers.  There is no Dominion equipment (and there was never a call to Dominion, nor an ask for any clerk to use Dominion equipment, as has been erroneously claimed).  The reality is, Americans do not currently have the political horsepower to wrest our elections from the corrupt establishment and make our national or state elections transparent and trustworthy.  We can only get there if we win in 2024.  Yet even with these corrupted systems, I am confident we will win in 2024 because President Trump is so far ahead, and because Joe Biden is so demonstrably awful.  However, there is still an important sequence of events we must consider:

1) If we want hand-counted, paper ballot elections throughout the United States, we must first win in 2024 by electing President Trump and then immediately begin working on Election Integrity. 

2) To begin work on Election Integrity, President Trump needs solid conservative representatives from Colorado and nationwide that will work with him, and just as importantly, who will NOT support soft leadership that sandbags him – as we saw Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell do during Trump’s first term.

3) For Trump to get solid representatives from Colorado who will assist with his agenda and help drain the swamp, he must come to Colorado and weigh in on how best to move his agenda forward.

4) For Trump to visit Colorado, we need a drama-free assembly that moves his presidential campaign messaging forward and builds his nationwide momentum.  A delayed report or other disruptions that impede Trump’s momentum will impact points 1-3, above.

5) Colorado is being called by some a Tier 1 Swing State in 2024.  We owe that in large part to the heroic fight Chairman Dave Williams has waged against Jena Griswold and the Colorado Supreme Court.  It means our state is not a sideline event, but an immediate player with potential impact on the presidential election. 

But we risk becoming a Tier 2 Swing State if we cannot deliver a drama-free assembly. 

Accordingly, I express my full support for Chairman Dave Williams on this issue.  We are conducting hand counted elections.  The hand count will be the official result.  That’s a big win. 

Using any electronic equipment, even in a backup role, is not what we want for future elections.  But this reasonable compromise gets us 90% of the way to what we do want.  It provides a hand count as the primary method and gets us on a path to secure all future elections.

Let’s do this, move forward, and Make America Great Again.
 
Respectfully,
Ron Hanks, Chairman, Ballot and Election Security Committee