Colorado communities may be visited in the coming months by a touring election denier who is pushing to throw out electronic voting machines.
The “Hand Count Road Show” aims to make stops in towns and cities across the U.S., with presentations that hawk wild conspiracies and call for all elections to be switched to a hand count voting system.
Experts warn that, due to hand-counting votes being “tedious and repetitive,” any system relying on human counters is potentially subject to higher error rates. Additionally, some have raised concerns that, due to requiring more time and manpower, hand count elections could put a greater strain on local elections offices, which are often under-resourced.
The show is not just being presented to the grassroots; it has found a platform among multiple state Republican parties, including in Colorado. In November, it came to the Colorado GOP’s official Capitol Club Luncheon fundraising event.
While the show’s website claims this mission is nonpartisan, the primary demographic that does not already trust elections is predominantly conservative. Some fringe Democrats have jumped into conspiracies following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, but these claims are broadly rejected by the mainstream. Many top Republicans, including all of the Colorado GOP officers and Trump himself, still promote the debunked claim that Democratic machinations stole the 2020 election from Trump.
The IT Guy
After Trump’s victory in November, many conservatives who had embraced election conspiracies declared that they had successfully outvoted the fraud; their election turnout was, as Trumpworld called it, “too big to rig.”
Mark Cook, a software engineer, was not one of them.
“We could have lost yet another presidential election. And if they wanted to have taken that one, they could have,” Cook recently told the South Jefferson County Tea Party. “… However, if they did that again, everyone in the country would have known there’s a problem. So strategically, and it’s as I told people for a year before the 2024 election, their best strategic approach for this election is to let Trump win. Let the will of the people be reflected for the presidential election and then steal the down-ballots. I hate that I’m constantly right.”
Much like the 2020 election, there is no evidence that the 2024 election was stolen – though, in fairness, Republican leaders have little incentive to investigate an election they largely won. In addition to the presidency, Republicans won both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, albeit by narrow margins. Republicans also made sizable inroads in state legislatures across the country.
Cook has taken issue with elections in Colorado, where Democrats have held a statewide trifecta for several years, and where Republican gains were more subdued compared with other states.
Cook first got his start in election conspiracism after Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. His reason for initially questioning the results is the same as many of his fellow conspiracists: he didn’t personally see many people supporting Biden, so therefore, in his mind, Biden should not have won.
“But after the 2020 election, which I saw Colorado, I went to a lot of the rallies. I saw how much support there wasn’t for one particular candidate,” Cook said at the JeffCo event. “When I saw the results, I thought, ‘There’s absolutely no way this could actually be. This just doesn’t make sense. It’s not consistent with my perspective.’”
Cook went on to become a founding member of U.S. Election Integrity Project (USEIP), a Colorado-based group that got its start organizing around false allegations that the 2020 presidential race was stolen from Trump. In the wake of this election, USEIP would organize a “Patriot Caravan” to travel to the Jan. 6 Stop the Steal rally in Washington D.C., which infamously culminated in disgruntled protesters storming the U.S. Capitol building.
Later in 2021, Cook used his computer expertise to assist Dallas Schroeder, at that time the Elbert County Clerk, in breaching security to create unauthorized copies of Elbert County’s election system hard drives. Schroeder was also aided by Shawn Smith, a Jan. 6 rioter and fellow USEIP member who has gone on to join a national cast of semi-prominent election conspiracists. Smith now leads Cause of America, a national group funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
Like Smith, Cook has a history of working with Joe Oltmann, who gained infamy after calling for Gov. Jared Polis and others to be executed for treason. Last year, he joined Oltmann, along with Smith and Lindell, to speak against voting machines at a Custer County Commission meeting. Cook was the only one of the speakers to attend in person, where he gave the commissioners a demonstration of his hand count process.
In November, Cook joined Oltmann and Smith once again for the Colorado Republican Party’s official Capitol Club Luncheon, an event that Cook listed on the ‘Events’ section of Hand Count Road Show’s website. During the luncheon, Cook said that Colorado’s 2024 election results are “irredeemably compromised and they probably need to all be redone.”
In his session with the South Jefferson County Tea Party, Cook even repeated the claim for which Oltmann is currently being sued: that former Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer was recorded on an “Antifa conference call” bragging about personally rigging the 2020 election.
“Eric Coomer’s in a lot of it. He’s the go-to guy when no one else can figure it out. They contact Eric. And Eric will say he’s not much of a conservative, and he’s not much of a Trump fan either,” Cook told the South JeffCo Tea Party. “So Joe Oltmann overheard him on a Zoom call with a bunch of antifa and BLM journalists, and Joe heard him say, ‘Trump’s not going to win. I made effing sure of it.’”
The claim was deemed “probably false” by a Denver judge, who wrote that the story “appears … deliberately crafted in a way to make it impossible to be verified by anyone attempting to investigate the veracity of Oltmann’s outlandish claims.”
In the weeks since that event, Cook has held a “focus group” in El Paso County; visited the South Jefferson County Tea Party; and made an appearance on CO Springs-area radio show “The Peak News.” In the coming months, visits are planned for Montezuma County, the Mountain Republicans Club in Evergreen, Pueblo County, and a private event in Denver. Hand Count Road Show is supposed to take off for a second official tour in May.
Under its “Take Action” section, Hand Count Road Show’s website includes a page titled “Get Involved as a Sheriff.” Here, local sheriffs, or those who work with them, can request that Cook make a stop in their county. Many election conspiracists have forged alliances with local right-wing “constitutional” sheriffs.
While Lindell is a major funder of election deniers around the country, Cook says that he is funded “only by the citizens.” He solicits donations on his website to pay expenses for his return to the road later this year, most of which he says would go to maintaining and operating the Hand Count Road Show trailer.
Out-of-State Connections
Wizware Technologies, a software company operating out of Lakewood, owns the domain registration for the handcountroadshow.org website. But that’s not the only thing: it also owns the domain for Mock County, a small community in Texas.
As the name indicates, Mock County is not a real county. The website, which is designed similarly to the official websites for actual counties, exists as a rhetorical device, representing a more utopian county that has adopted Cook’s hand count election procedure.
Cook did not respond to an email asking whether WizWare is his company. However, WizWare’s remote tech support page allows users to choose a technician to help them. At the time of writing, only one name is listed: Mark, with no last name.
Over the course of 2022, Wizware Technologies was paid over $25,000 by Conservatives for Election Integrity (CFEI) PAC for unspecified services. This PAC, based out of Nevada, was tied to former Nevada state Rep. Jim Marchant and his unsuccessful 2022 bid for Secretary of State. At the time, CFEI had received multiple complaints for violations of campaign finance law, with evidence suggesting that Marchant had illegally used the PAC to avoid donation limits.
At the time, Marchant was the de facto leader of a national slate of election-denying Secretary of State candidates, the America First Secretary of State Coalition. The slate also included Colorado Secretary of State candidate Tina Peters, who ultimately lost the GOP primary election to Pam Anderson. Part of the coalition’s platform involved throwing out voting machines in favor of a system involving hand-counting ballots.
“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re gonna fix the whole country, and President Trump is gonna be president again in 2024,” Marchant said at a Trump rally in October 2022. Of the coalition, only one candidate – Diego Morales of Indiana – was elected Secretary of State that November.
Cook has also given his presentation to conservatives in numerous other states, including key swing states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. Specifically in Arizona, he seems to have demonstrated his hand count system to the state GOP at their party convention, as well as at other Arizona Republican events.
“I’ve done this now for Maricopa County Republican Committee,” Cook said at the JeffCo event. “I did a full hand count election with them with cameras over tables in the room and scanners on each table that scanned the ballots and produced ballot images for all the public to have.”
“It’s So Simple to Do”
Cook’s proposed replacement system is, theoretically, simple: all ballots must be submitted in person on election day. Those ballots are to be counted by hand, right there at the precinct where they were submitted. If there are not enough precincts to handle election day voting, his solution is equally simple: just make more precincts.
“People say, well, this county is too big or this city is too big. It doesn’t matter. You do it in small precincts, you just have more precincts. It’s so simple to do,” Cook said in his December appearance on “The Peak News.”
But is it really so simple?
Matt Crane, former Arapahoe County Clerk and executive director of the Colorado County Clerks’ Association, raised doubts about the plan.
“Let’s not forget that America has been through a process where hand counting ballots was the norm for a long time going back to history, and we went away from it because it was inaccurate and rife for fraud,” Crane told the Colorado Times Recorder.
Crane mentioned that part of Cook’s plan — all but eliminating early and absentee voting — would dramatically raise the number of people voting in-person on election day, leading to significantly longer lines and wait times. This would put a greater strain on staff, amplified by the number of elections and issues on the ballot. Last year in Colorado, an above-average number of ballot initiatives led to an exceptionally long ballot.
“Here, like say in Arapahoe County, it’s not uncommon to have 40 or 50 contests on a single ballot. So, you know, right now our precinct size can go up to 2,000, you know, maybe a little bit higher, but let’s just be conservative,” Crane said. “Let’s say there’s 40 contests on a ballot at a particular precinct and there’s 1,500 people that come to vote that day, right? You’re talking about 60,000 potential votes that you are going to ask a team of people to start doing after a 15 or 16-hour day. It’s absurd on its face. There’s a reason why we want to have computers to tabulate votes.”
Cook, who did not respond to an email asking about the logistical issues of his hand count plan brought up by Crane, has seemed to question the role of election officials like Crane — saying they should be officiators who are responsible for making the results public, but that the elections themselves should be run by citizen-activists like him.
“Our clerks, our election officials should be election transparency agents. Their job, you just need to give us all the training to run the elections,” Cook said at the JeffCo event. “Let us run the elections. We hand it all back to them and then they put it out online for everyone to see.”
