Colorado election integrity group aims to organize counties against state voter rolls before 2026 midterms

DENVER — A statewide organizing campaign is pressing Colorado counties to collectively refuse to use the state’s voter registration system ahead of the November 2026 midterm elections, arguing that bloated and inaccurate voter rolls undermine public confidence in the electoral process.

Jim Elliott, state leader for Colorado Election Integrity, outlined the strategy on The Kim Monson Show on Monday, describing an effort to persuade multiple counties to act in concert rather than individually. An event Monday evening at the Lone Tree Library will feature county-level voter roll data for Arapahoe, Douglas, Boulder, and Denver counties, presented by Douglas Frank, a scientist who has analyzed voter registration data across 48 states.

“The vicissitude for reform is here, but only if we the people act,” Elliott said.

County-level data as a rallying point

The Lone Tree Library event, scheduled from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at 10055 Library Way, is designed to arm county-level activists with localized data showing discrepancies in their own voter rolls. Frank plans to present figures for four Front Range counties, including his finding that Douglas County carries approximately 287,000 active voter registrations against a voting-age population of roughly 280,000, according to his analysis.

Elliott and Frank are using county-specific presentations as a tool to build grassroots pressure from the ground up. The strategy, Elliott said, is to demonstrate that the problems in Colorado’s voter rolls are not abstract statewide statistics but measurable anomalies visible at the local level.

Elliott described finding what he called a 2,020-year-old voter on a demographic list registered to a mailbox store address, which he said constitutes two separate violations of Colorado election law.

“The very first thing that I looked at on my list was an age-sorted demographic list of people, and I found somebody who was 2,020 years old,” Elliott said on the show.

The collective refusal strategy

Elliott’s approach centers on persuading conservative counties, particularly in areas like the San Luis Valley, to act together in refusing to rely on the state’s voter rolls. The collective approach is deliberate. Individual counties that have challenged election processes in recent years have faced political isolation; Elliott’s goal is to create a coalition large enough to force the issue into the public eye.

Since 2020, Republican canvass board members in Boulder, El Paso, Jefferson, Larimer, and La Plata counties have declined to sign off on election results, according to The Denver Post. Those refusals were largely individual acts of protest. Elliott’s effort represents an attempt to formalize county-level resistance into a coordinated campaign with a specific demand: clean the voter rolls before November 2026.

Elliott said the Secretary of State is required to run National Change of Address checks monthly and that counties must act on the results, but compliance across the state has been inadequate. The Colorado County Clerks Association describes an active maintenance process that includes daily duplicate checks and daily corrections data from the Department of Corrections.

DOJ lawsuit and legislative pushback

The organizing effort comes as the U.S. Department of Justice sues Colorado for refusing to produce unredacted voter registration records. The federal lawsuit, filed Dec. 11, 2025, alleges that Secretary of State Jena Griswold violated the National Voter Registration Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 by declining to hand over complete voter data.

Griswold has vowed to fight the suit, saying the state will not “hand over Coloradans’ sensitive voting information to Donald Trump.”

At the state level, the Colorado Voting Rights Act (SB25-001), which applies to elections on or after Jan. 1, 2026, creates civil causes of action for voter suppression that results in a material disparity for members of a protected class. The law also authorizes the attorney general to investigate potential violations and file suit. Elliott characterized the law as an effort to discourage citizens from challenging the validity of voter registrations, though the statute does not explicitly criminalize individual voter challenges.

For Elliott and Colorado Election Integrity, the combination of a federal government suing for transparency and a state government advancing laws that could chill citizen oversight represents the core of their argument: that organized, county-level action is the only remaining path to voter roll reform before the midterms.