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Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross prioritizes transparency to restore community trust • Colorado Newsline [1]

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Date: 2024-06-03  

In an effort to restore trust with the local community, Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Bobbie Gross is promoting transparency and increasing security measures to ensure fair elections for the county that made national headlines following the 2020 presidential election.

Mesa County voters elected Gross, a Republican, in 2022 to replace former Clerk Tina Peters, who was indicted in March 2022 by a grand jury on seven felony charges and three misdemeanors related to her attempts to prove election fraud in Mesa County. Peters has perpetuated the debunked notion that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election and that former President Donald Trump won.

The clerk’s office is in charge of elections, the department of motor vehicles, clerk services for the board of county commissioners, and county recording. As a former employee in the clerk’s office, Gross said it’s been a comfortable role for her to jump into. This year will be the first presidential election in the county since Peters’ indictment.

Gross initially started at the clerk’s office in 2007 and worked in a variety of roles before she left in early 2019. Before she was elected to be clerk, she worked for the Mesa County treasurer as deputy public trustee and treasurer technician.

Her predecessor faces three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, one count of criminal impersonation and one count of identity theft. An election denier, Peters is alleged to have participated in a scheme to breach secure equipment in her own elections office in 2021 in an attempt to find evidence that Colorado’s voting system was rigged.

Peters’ indictment recounts that she allowed an unauthorized person into the room during an election system software update conducted by the Colorado secretary of state’s office. After that update, system passwords and other sensitive information were posted online.

Claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent or compromised have been debunked by elections officials, experts, media investigations, law enforcement and the courts.

To Gross, the clerk’s office in Mesa County has always run accurate and safe elections.

“I think what happened in 2021 was an internal breach, and it’s one that we took seriously,” Gross said. She said she hasn’t seen any evidence proving that something went wrong with the 2020 election: “I look for the facts versus speculation… and I haven’t seen anything that would overturn that election.”

Fraud does sometimes happen during an election, Gross said, and when it does, it’s caught and reported to the district attorney. She said violations of voting law could be unintentional, like if a parent tries to submit a ballot for their child who is away at college. Regardless, she said fraudulent ballots are caught and not included in vote counts.

“I have to account for every single ballot that comes to my front doors, and if I’m off by one or two votes and it doesn’t match, I have to be able to explain why it doesn’t match,” Gross said.

Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said Gross is “incredibly bright” and is working hard to rebuild trust in her community’s elections.

“Mainly, it’s just by doing things the right way every day,” Crane said. “It’s just getting back to that level of normality that I think Bobbie and her team are doing a great job of each day trying to rebuild that trust.”

Crane said based on what he’s heard from the community in Mesa County, it didn’t take long for people to realize that Peters “had no idea what she was talking about.”

Gross has implemented increased security measures including an enhanced camera system around the room that contains the secure election equipment that was involved in the Peters breach. Only certain staff members can access the room by scanning their badges, and Gross gets alert to her phone and email any time someone enters the secure room.

“If it goes off at two o’clock in the morning, obviously that would raise a red flag for me, versus during our normal business hours from 8 to 5,” Gross said.

Staff — Gross included — are also only permitted to enter the secure room in pairs, she said. Any member of the public who comes into the clerk’s office for a tour must sign in and out of the building, Gross said.

“We understand that the best way to create trust with our election system is to make them as transparent as possible, and to ensure that the public is involved in supporting that process,” Gross said. “Multiple times each year, we hold open houses where people could come in, they can see the equipment, they can ask questions.”

Gross said holding tours and open houses during a live election allows people to see how the ballots are counted and how workers ensure they have the same number of vote counts as they do ballots tabulated.

“We’ve had people that said, ‘Hey, I didn’t know that’s how it was done, and thank you for showing us that,’” Gross said. “Sometimes people’s perception is not reality when it comes to elections, so I always invite people to come in, learn our process and go to the source. If you have questions about elections, go to the people that conduct your elections, because they’re going to be the ones that know what to do and how it’s processed.”

The clerk’s office also conducts a test of all the election equipment before an election, a process that is also open to the public, Gross said. A bipartisan team will come in to submit test ballots, which are then hand-counted and tabulated to ensure everything is accurate.

Jan Moorman, president of the League of Women Voters of Mesa County, said her organization has always had confidence in the elections systems and processes in the county, even during Peters’ tenure. Before Gross took office, she said meeting with Director of Elections Brandi Bantz and Elections Manager Stephanie Wenholz helped maintain their confidence in the county’s election systems.

The difference is that now, LWV has a partnership with the clerk’s office as they both aim to protect election integrity.

“We feel that we have a partner in a position that’s very important,” Moorman said about Grossk. “It’s not that trust has increased, it’s more that fear has been removed.”

Bantz and Wenholz together received the Michele M. Burton Excellence in Election Service award from the CCCA for their work overseeing elections and combating misinformation in Mesa County while Peters remained in office.

Many of her members regularly attend civic and community events, and Moorman said Gross is always in attendance to represent her office and speak to the integrity of the elections system.

“She’s not just sitting there hoping that the word gets out,” Moorman said. “I don’t know where she finds the time — she seems to be at every event that I go to.”

Gross said she intends to put all of the county’s ballot images online so that any member of the public can do their own hand count and compare their results to the cast vote records. Her office did this for the 2021 coordinated election results with the support of Mesa County Commissioners in March 2023.

“Hand counting is very expensive, so to conduct it after the election, it does take a lot of resources and a lot of taxpayer dollars,” Gross said. “For those people that really are interested in it, I’ll put them online, we’ll make sure that they can hand count it.”

Gross said employees across all divisions of the clerk’s office understand and respect the election processes and feel supported in their work. She said there’s always some skepticism when an election comes around, which is why she wants to maintain transparency and continue to invite the public to see how her office runs elections.

Staff go through regular security training, which Gross said is especially important given the growing presence of artificial intelligence. She also started to keep Narcan, an opioid overdose antidote, in the elections office after elections officials in other states received letters contaminated with fentanyl.

Gross said Mesa County’s ballot processing equipment is not connected to the internet in any way, but the voter registration database elections staff need to access is connected to the internet. Staff are also encouraged to report anything that seems unusual or suspicious to ensure elections judges and voters remain safe.

“Our team loves elections. We just really love the process of it,” Gross said. “We try to stay out of the political aspect of it and just focus on the process of elections and make sure that we’re doing what we can to make sure people can vote.”

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[1] Url: https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/06/03/mesa-county-clerk-bobbie-gross-prioritizes-transparency-to-restore-community-trust/

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