Republicans in Colorado — who last month held two votes to remove the state party chair, leading to a schism within the party and legal challenges to determine who is actually in charge — can’t believe Democrats keep winning.
“Colorado is the petri dish of all the naughty stuff that is happening,” said KLZ 560 radio host Kim Monson during the Colorado GOP’s monthly fundraiser luncheon. “I look at these elections and it’s like, how is this happening?”
The answer for a not insignificant amount of Colorado Republicans is that the elections must be rigged. This belief, which is not supported by evidence, has led to the criminal prosecution of former Republican Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, and civil defamation lawsuits against conservative influencer Joe Oltmann, and conservative media figures like Michelle Malkin, Randy Corporon, and KNUS, the Denver affiliate of conservative Salem Media.
“We have amazing candidates that are stepping forward to run for office, and many times their opponents are in the basement, or not taking questions, as we’re seeing at the national level,” said Monson. “How can they be winning these elections?”
The “amazing candidates” fielded by Republicans in recent years have included gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl, who tried to win voters with the right-wing fever dream of pro-LGBTQ furries using litter boxes in classrooms, and U.S. Senate candidate Joe O’Dea, whose attempts at walking a fine line on abortion, voicing support for both Roe v. Wade and a 20-week ban on abortions, drew criticism from both conservatives and progressives.
Monson’s takeaway is not that these are mediocre candidates with incredibly unpopular policy positions, but rather that the elections themselves are somehow rigged, putting Republicans at a disadvantage.
“The real bad boy that started this whole thing is House Bill 13-1303, and that was where Colorado brought in mail-In ballots,” said Monson. “That’s where we lurched all the way to the radical left. There’s a lot of stuff in there that is legal, but it’s not right.”
Mail-in ballots have long been a bugbear for conservatives who can’t win elections. Conspiracies about mail-in ballots were at the heart of the 2022 election conspiracy documentary “2,000 Mules,” which claimed progressive nonprofits used paid ballot “mules” to distribute enough false ballots in battleground states to swing the results of the 2020 election. In May, Salem Media, the company behind the film, issued an apology and said it would halt distribution of the film and remove both the film and book from its platforms. Salem Media is also facing a lawsuit from former Dominion executive Eric Coomer after former KNUS host Randy Corporon platformed Douglas County podcaster Joe Oltmann, whose claims about an alleged “antifa conference call” have been ruled “probably false” by a Denver District Court judge.
In February, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced $3.5 million in support of county elections for the 2024 statewide primary and general election to improve election security and accessibility.
“As Secretary of State, my top priority is making sure our elections are accessible and secure,” said Griswold in a news release. “I’m proud to announce $3.5 million in election security and accessibly grants available to Colorado’s 64 counties so Colorado continues to be the nation’s gold standard of elections.”
Monson’s plan to help Republicans overcome mail-in ballots is to raise over $200,000 to pay national election conspiracy figures to file lawsuits in Colorado.
“There’s a group called United Sovereign Americans, and they have a Colorado chapter,” said Monson. “It’s all volunteers, and this Colorado chapter, they went through our 2022 election, and they found over 1.4 [million] anomalies in the 2022 election. You might ask what those might be. Over a million of them were people that voted before they registered. Do we not think that there could be a problem? … The advisor on this is Bruce Castor, who is the former AG in Pennsylvania. But to do something in Colorado, we needed to raise $50,000 for his legal team.”
Monson said one of their goals is to prevent the certification of the 2024 election. “We sent out letters and we raised the $50,000,” she said. “The legal team is in place in Colorado. The plaintiffs are ongoing, and legal action should be filed within the next couple of days to compel Colorado to come up to the minimum standards as set forth by Congress for elections. If they don’t, there’s a lot of things that can happen. But one thing is they can not certify the election.”
In June, Castor filed a similar lawsuit in Pennsylvania, with similar claims of anomalies and errors. “It relies on their own data analysis, which has been shown — the analysis of these particular plaintiffs — to be completely faulty and discredited,” Marian Schneider, senior policy counsel for voting rights with the ACLU of Pennsylvania, told NPR affiliate WHYY.
A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of State categorized the lawsuit as unmerited and “frivolous,” just like lawsuits filed by election conspiracy lawyer Sidney Powell, who settled with former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer in June. In 2021, Powell and attorney Lin Wood were sanctioned $150,000 for their lawsuits filed in Michigan, which U.S. District Judge Linda Parker wrote were based on “speculation, conjecture, and unwarranted suspicion.”
Castor isn’t the only arrow in Monson’s quiver. “We’re working with Peter Bernegger with the Wisconsin Center for Election Justice and Jay Valentine with Omega4America, fractal technology,” she said. “[They’re] going through a variety of different databases to determine where ballots are going out, where people can’t live.”
In 2009, Bernegger was convicted of mail and bank fraud in Mississippi and was sentenced to seventy months in prison and ordered to pay restitution of approximately $2 million. in February 2022 Bernegger worked with Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice who was hired by Wisconsin Rep. Robin Vos (R) to find evidence for election fraud. Gableman’s investigation cost Wisconsin taxpayers more than $2 million and found no evidence of widespread fraud. In 2022 Bernegger was fined more than $2,400 by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for making frivolous complaints about “fake voters.” Bernegger is currently facing felony charges for allegedly simulating legal processes by unlawfully modifying a subpoena.
Valentine’s Omega4America program, which is described on their website as “quantum technology” that “finds relationships, hidden in plain sight, in voter rolls, dark money contributions, FEC and state contribution rolls — showing the hidden networks controlling American elections and culture,” began in 2021 with the help of MyPillow CEO and Coomer defamation defendant Mike Lindell and conservative activist David Clarke. In 2023, Texas activists wanted Valentine’s program to replace the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which maintains voter rolls in 24 states, including Colorado, after Texas legislators introduced a bill to withdraw from ERIC.
The Oset Institute, a nonpartisan nonprofit that works to increase confidence in elections, has critiqued the use of “fractal technology” like Valentine’s.
“There is no complexity in the administration of election data that would necessarily benefit from the application of fractal concepts,” wrote Gregory Miller, Oset’s co-founder and COO, in April. “In our 17-years in election technology and 40-years in technology overall, we strongly believe fractal is not helpful for election data administration.”
Monson hopes Colorado Republicans will foot the bill for this venture. “We are raising $182,500, which is going to go to Wisconsin Center for Election Justice and using this technology to determine these undeliverable ballots,” she said. “Part of that will go to the attorneys.”
