Election Security Under Fire: BIOS Passwords, Signature Verification, and the Push for Hand Counts

On Monday, November 4, 2024, the day before Election Day, Kim Monson assembled election integrity experts and advocates to dissect vulnerabilities in Colorado’s voting systems. From the Superior Farms ballot measure to exposed BIOS passwords to signature verification failures, the broadcast provided crucial pre-election analysis with Bonnie Brown of the Colorado Wool Growers Association, election security analyst Robert Cooper, retired Air Force Colonel Shawn Smith, and Libertarian Party leaders Hannah Goodman and James Wiley. Property Rights and the Superior Farms Ballot Measure Start listening at 16:36 – Hour 1 Bonnie Brown, Executive Director of the Colorado Wool Growers Association, exposes the deceptive tactics behind Denver’s Ordinance 309, which would shut down Superior Farm’s lamb processing plant. Pro Animal Future, the activist group pushing the measure, recruited a supposed whistleblower who never actually worked for Superior Farms. The man worked at the facility briefly in the 1980s, a full decade before Superior purchased the plant in 1996. Brown emphasizes that the 160 employees at Superior Farms have repeatedly stated they enjoy their jobs and did not ask for this ban. Temple Grandin, the world-renowned livestock handling expert, reviewed the undercover videos and found no violations. The consequences extend far beyond Denver, as sheep ranchers across Colorado would face trucking their animals to California or Texas for processing, dramatically increasing costs that ultimately fall on consumers. “Pro Animal Future knows that voters in Colorado are not going to agree with their radical agenda to eliminate livestock production. So they try to sneak in the back door by saying, let’s shut down this slaughter plant because we can build a false narrative around that to dupe voters with a misinformation campaign.” Bonnie Brown, Executive Director, Colorado Wool Growers Association The Signature Verification Problem Start listening at 32:10 – Hour 1 Robert Cooper, election security researcher, reveals that signature verification represents the sole form of voter ID in Colorado’s mail-in ballot system. Once a signature passes verification and the envelope opens, that vote can never be pulled back. Cooper points to Mesa County’s 2022 fraud detection case, where officials caught only nine of twelve known fraudulent ballots through signature verification, a 25 percent failure rate on known fraud. Cooper highlights a troubling disparity across Colorado counties. Analysis of ballot reconciliation reports shows signature rejection rates ranging from 0.6 percent to 2.2 percent, nearly a four-fold variance. Financial institutions abandoned signature verification as a sole ID method two decades ago due to unreliability. Forensic signature specialists require two to three years of training for court certification, while election judges receive roughly two hours of training. “The entire voter ID verification of a mail-in voting system is based on signature verification, and banks don’t use that as the only source.” Robert Cooper, Election Security Researcher BIOS Passwords and Voting System Vulnerabilities Start listening at 69:12 – Hour 2 Retired Air Force Colonel Shawn Smith of Cause of America offers a technical analysis of the BIOS password breach that exposed voting machine credentials for 63 of 64 Colorado counties. Secretary of State Jenna Griswold claimed security remained intact bec...