October 23, 2013 11:50 AM UTC

Jon Keyser's "Failed System?" So Much For That

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Independent's John Tomasic reports:

Jon Keyser, a Republican candidate running for House District 25 in Jefferson County, reported receiving two ballots in the mail last week. He tweeted photos of them and suggested the state’s election system was unreliable. “C’mon Man! #FailedSystem” he wrote. Unfortunately, Keyser shredded one of the ballots, so there’s no way to gauge whether the system failed or not…

“Liberals and the media often are quick to dismiss the possibility of voter fraud, but Colorado’s new all-mail ballot system shows that there are gaps in the system,” the Peak Politics blog author wrote. “The lack of ballot security in Colorado elections stems from a bill passed last legislative session, HB13-1303. The bill required that mail ballots be sent to all registered voters, regardless of whether they are active…Who knows what other violations are out there?”

But a funny thing happened when qualified folks asked questions about this seemingly troubling story:

Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson, one of the many Republican clerks who supported the reform bill this year, called Keyser when she saw his tweet this weekend.

“We take this kind of thing very seriously,” she said. “It was clear to me that the bottom ballot in the photo was not a Jefferson County ballot. The label is different. The color is different. The indicia are different. It’s not one of ours…

“I asked if the ballot inside the envelopes were the same. He said he couldn’t remember and that he had destroyed the ballot.” [Pols emphasis]

As GOP Jefferson County Clerk Pam Anderson explained to the Independent, there's a possibility that the "second ballot" that HD-25 candidate Jonathan Keyser received was for a special taxing district election, perhaps for property Keyser owns outside of Jefferson County. The mailing label on the second mail ballot Keyser received wasn't printed with the high quality printing equipment used in Jefferson County–one of a number of details that made Anderson immediately suspicious of Keyser's claims to have received "two ballots."

If you look at the photo of Keyser's "two ballots" (above right, full size after the jump), you can see he conceals the return address on the second ballot–which has the crudely-printed label, compared to the Jefferson County ballot for which the return address is visible. That concealment, combined with the Republican Jefferson County Clerk's explanation, and the fact that Keyser now claims to have "shredded" the second ballot, and "can't remember" if the two ballots were for two different things, leads to one inescapable conclusion:

Jonathan Keyser, Republican candidate for the Colorado House, knows he was making this up.