May 15, 2026 10:01 AM UTC

Even More Right-Wing Petition Fraud

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Denver Post’s Katie Langford reports, 2024’s Amendment 80, a ballot measure pushed by conservative interest groups to promote charter schools, failed with less than 50% of the vote against a 55% passage threshold. And now, a post-election review of signatures gathered to place the measure on the ballot to begin with has resulted in criminal charges filed almost two years after the measure’s failure:

Two people who worked for a Front Range political canvassing company are charged with forging signatures on petitions used to get a Colorado school choice amendment on the 2024 general election ballot, the state attorney general’s office said…

According to the indictment, Long and Arellano were independent contractors for Victor’s Canvassing in Colorado Springs and were tasked with gathering signatures for Amendment 80, a school choice measure that Colorado voters rejected in the November 2024 election.

…A company that reviewed the petition after it was first turned in found that of the 190,000 signatures submitted, 131,000 “appeared to be valid,” which was over the 124,238 signature threshold, the attorney general’s office said.

But staff at the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office found suspicious signatures during a post-election review because several did not match signatures that the state already had on record, the attorney general’s office said.

KOAA-TV Colorado Springs reports the two alleged petition forgers Cherell Long and Martin Arellano are at large and presumably out of state:

Both Arellano and Long are charged with one count each of the following:

• attempt to influence a public servant, a class 4 felony
• elections forgery, a class 5 felony
• forgery, a class 5 felony
• perjury, a class 2 misdemeanor

Anyone who may have information a bout the whereabouts of Long and Arrelano is asked to call their local law enforcement agency.

Unfortunately, Colorado has witnessed a number of high-profile petition fraud cases in recent years, which led to some legislative reforms after the 2016 election cycle produced numerous cases including one that helped bring down a leading Republican U.S. Senate candidate. Those reforms were sorely tested in 2018 when Republican candidate for governor Walker Stapleton withdrew his fraudulent petition signatures to make the ballot after they were approved by then-Secretary of State Wayne Williams. In 2022, Attorney General Phil Weiser prosecuted a man who submitted the names of dead people on behalf of a Republican candidate in Colorado’s 7th Congressional District.

By this time you might be noticing a certain…commonality between these petition fraud cases. We could spell it out for you, but instead, let’s find out if readers are paying attention!

Eh, never mind. Just like ballot fraud, in Colorado, it’s always Republicans who do election crimes.

We’ll let you know if that ever changes. But the record is plain.