The Pueblo Police Department arrested a man accused of tampering with a ballot marking machine during Colorado’s June 28 primary.
Richard Patton, a 31-year-old from Pueblo, has been charged with tampering with a voting machine — a class 5 felony under state law — and cybercrime, which is a misdemeanor.
The arrest, which occurred Thursday morning, marks the first potential prosecution after Colorado enacted a new law safeguarding elections against potential threats to voting equipment. The Colorado Election Security Act, which went into effect in June, makes it a felony to tamper with voting equipment or allow unauthorized access to voting equipment.
In an exclusive interview with CBS News, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold called the 2022 contest the “first midterm elections when the country is facing an evolved threat of insider threats.”
Late on Colorado’s primary Election Day, election workers at the Voter Service and Polling Center in the Pueblo Clerk’s Office in Pueblo heard noises coming from a voting booth across the room, according to a senior official with the Colorado secretary of state’s office. When an election judge went to the booth to investigate and to clean the machine, after a voter had left a booth, in accordance with regular protocol, there was an error message on the screen reading, “USB device change detected. Please call a poll worker for assistance.”
The supervising election judge was immediately notified and the incident was reported to the secretary of state’s office and law enforcement. The Pueblo Police Department took possession of the ImageCast X voting machine, according to the official.
“We would like to assure the community that all voter safeguards put in place to protect the voter process were successful,” the Pueblo Police Department said in a press release. “No information has been found to be breached at this time.” Law enforcement added that the investigation remains active and ongoing.
In Colorado, Image Cast X ballot-marking devices used by in-person voters have various security measures to detect and mitigate the risk of tampering. Since only “whitelisted” removable storage media operate on devices, an error message appears on the screen if an individual plugs something into the machine that isn’t authorized. The machine won’t be operational until the issue is addressed.
Tamper-proof seals are used on voting equipment across Colorado, including ImageCast X machines used for in-person voting. The official indicated that seals on the device in Pueblo appeared disturbed.
Under Colorado law, a class 5 felony can be punished by a 1-2 year jail sentence and/or a fine of anywhere between $1,000-$100,000.
Colorado’s new law followed the sentencing of a prominent election official and secretary of state candidate. Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was barred from overseeing elections after being indicted on charges of tampering with election equipment and official misconduct.
Jen Easterly, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said Sunday that her agency has not seen “specific or credible threats” to compromise election infrastructure before Election Day.
“It is a very complex threat environment,” Easterly noted during an interview with “Face the Nation.” “You have cyber threats, you have insider threats, you have rampant disinformation. And yes, very worryingly, you have threats of harassment, intimidation and violence against election officials, polling places and voters. Let’s be really clear. That has to stop.”
Griswald counts herself among election officials who have encountered a barrage of violent threats since the 2020 election. Last month, a Nebraska man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for online threats issued to the secretary. Travis Ford, of Lincoln, was sentenced after pleading guilty to sending threats to Griswold, which prosecutors allege he did multiple times via an Instagram account.
“The threats are ongoing,” Griswald told CBS News. “They’ve been ongoing against me since June of 2021… I got an uptick in threats over the last couple of weeks.” She estimates that her office has made thousands of referrals to the Justice Department since the 2020 election.
Another new provision — the Vote Without Fear Act — signed into law this year, bans anyone in Colorado from openly carrying a firearm within 100 feet of a voting location, unless their property falls within that buffer.
“You can’t open carry. You can’t dox or intimidate. You can’t compromise the voting equipment. We’ve been tightening the laws. We have zero tolerance for voter intimidation,” Griswald told CBS News.
While election denialists including FEC United, a far-right group in Colorado with a militia wing, have threatened to monitor poll drop boxes in Colorado, the state has been given no indication that this sort of election monitoring is occurring. Still, the prospect lingers.
“The level of disinformation has reached an unprecedented height,” Griswold said. “And initially, it was our foreign adversaries trying to mislead folks. But now it’s many elected officials and former elected officials and candidates, which is incredibly dangerous. The lies that the former president and people aligned with him continue to push out are dangerous — they are leading to political violence.”
“The ‘big lie’ is why I have a county working behind bulletproof glass,” Griswold continued, referencing new security measures in Salida, the county seat of Chaffee County. “It’s the reason that the man who threatened my life is now serving 18 months in prison.”
