A phone call from Mesa County’s elections office raised a red flag

MESA COUNTY, Colo. — Mesa County elections are no longer run by an election denier, but a phone call from the county elections office to a Colorado Mesa University student Tuesday morning certainly raised a red flag.

In a group text, that student asked her parents a simple question:

“Hey guys. I know it’s still early but can someone explain to me how I register to vote for the election?”

Almost immediately, both parents responded with a link to the Colorado voter registration website.

That student, who did not want to be named, registered to vote in Mesa County but wanted her ballot to be mailed to her parents’ address closer to the Denver metro area.

“[The student] had an address for the college, but the zip code was incorrect. So, the zip code didn’t match the address. And their mailing address, zip code also did not match that county,” Republican Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross said.

The student wanted to register to vote in Mesa County using her campus apartment address but wanted the ballot sent to her parents because of issues receiving her mail at the apartment.

The clerk said the phone call that the student received was about incorrect zip codes, but part of that call sounded like a scam. 

The student told her parents that the person from the elections office said she should register to vote at her parents’ address.

“Because that’s where my scholarships are based, and they can take away my scholarships if [I] put my residence in Mesa County,” the student texted her parents.

“They suggested that she check with her parents to make sure that she doesn’t want to change her residential address in case it does affect her scholarship,” Gross said. “We’re not experts on that. We try to refrain from making that determination. We also wanted to make sure that the voter wanted to register at the correct address, that Mesa County was her resident address.”

There would be no reason for the elections staffer to even know if the student had scholarships or if scholarships would be at risk.

A spokeswoman for Colorado Mesa University said that it would be highly unlikely that the student would be impacted by changing voter registration. There are private scholarships that are county specific, but it is not likely that a change of a student’s voter registration while on campus would impact that financial aid.

Gross said she would direct staff to stay within the expertise of election-related issues.

“It was a bad zip code,” Gross said. “And then we also wanted to verify that she is a resident of Colorado and didn’t want her ballot mailing address as the campus address.”

The student had her contact information included in her voter registration, so that made it simple for the county election office to reach out to her proactively.

“It’s definitely quicker for us to reach out to the voter to have it corrected than to send a letter to the address that we know is bad and then it comes back undeliverable, which we would make inactive,” Gross said.

Filing out a voter registration online requires precision.

Unlike typing in an address for a package delivery, where the website either finds your address before you finish or corrects any mistakes, the Secretary of State voter registration website accepts whatever gets typed in.

That information can be flagged by the county clerk’s office, just like it was done in Mesa County.

“We typically do this if we have a phone number for the voter, we’ll reach out to get the correct information,” Gross said.

It would not be inappropriate for an in-state college student to register in the county their school is in, while having their ballot delivered to their parents’ address.

“A lot of students will do that, and then their parents will make sure that they get it when they come home for a break,” Gross said. “Or the parents might come down to visit, they might have a plan to come visit and bring the ballot there.”

Ballots are recommended to be returned to a ballot box in that county, but a ballot envelope returned to any ballot box will be delivered to the county it is supposed to be counted in. That is a swap all county clerks coordinate as they receive ballots from incorrect counties.