Study uncovers 48 cases of possible improper voting in Colorado in 2016, just 0.001% of total vote

DENVER – A five-state study that included Colorado, which looked at possible improper voting in 11.5 million voter records, uncovered 112 possible instances—48 of which happened in Colorado.

The study looked at 11.5 million voter records from Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Delaware and Maryland. The first three states are mail-in ballot states, while Delaware and Maryland voting is conducted at polling places.

According to the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, 10 people in Colorado are suspected of voting twice in the state, and 38 are suspected of voting in Colorado and one of the other four states involved in the study.

The possible improper votes came from Republicans, Democrats, unaffiliated voters, and minor party voters, the office said.

But the states are stopping short of calling the instances “voter fraud”—saying that the cases need to be investigated further to see if there were any administrative errors that led to the double-votes.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office says county clerks had already identified “a handful” of the 48 cases found in the study and referred them to law enforcement. The office says the rest of the cases will be as well.

A total of 2,855,960 people cast votes in Colorado during last year’s General Election, which means the 48 possible improper votes amount to only 0.0016 percent of all ballots cast.

“A very small percentage of the 2.9 million votes cast in Colorado in the 2016 election look to be improper, but even that small number deserves our vigilant pursuit,” Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams said.

The Secretary of State’s Office said it will not be releasing the names of the suspected improper voters until investigations are completed at the request of law enforcement.

The study was already planned before voter fraud became a hot topic in the run-up to, and aftermath of last year’s election, when then-President Elect Donald Trump claimed millions of people had cast illegal votes.

The research was already underway when Trump’s highly-controversial Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was formed, and the researchers operated independently from the panel.

“Colorado’s county election administrators continue to do an outstanding job of protecting Colorado’s elections from fraud,” Williams said. “The vast majority of these cases involve voters who voted twice in ways the counties could not detect during the election. That’s why we take post-election reviews and prosecutions so seriously.”

Earlier this week, one woman charged with voter fraud was convicted of voting on one of her deceased parent’s ballots prior to the 2016 election. Several other cases are making their way through Colorado courts.