District Attorney investigation finds no evidence of criminal activity in election fraud report

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KKCO) – Mesa County district attorney, Dan Rubinstein has concluded his office’s investigation into claims made from a re porter, which alleged criminal activity stemming from two elections, including the 2020 presidential election.

The claims come from one of four reports regarding election fraud claims. According to Mesa County Commissioner, Cody Davis, have merely pointed out potential vulnerabilities within the county’s election system.

“We go through audits of those systems and try to eliminate vulnerabilities and we can continue to do that through the future even within our Dominion software,” said Davis. “However the last report that came out was the only one that actually said these separate files were created and therefore there is fraud.”

According to Dan Rubinstein’s report, on March 23, 2022 a report, which he refers to as “report 3” was given to him by Garfield County, Colorado resident Sherronna Bishop and Mesa County, Colorado resident Cory Anderson. According to Rubinstein’s report, the report submitted “evidence of potentially unauthorized and illegal manipulation of tabulated vote data during the 2020 General Election and 2021 Grand Junction Municipal Election.”

Presenting his investigation results before the Mesa County Commissioners, Rubinstein said. “This report however, report three, claims that criminal acts actually occurred and clerk Peters has claimed that this report was made from the forensic images that she made in 2021. She’s claiming that this proves election fraud.”

During his presentation, Rubinstein and D.A. investigator Michael Struwe combed through video evidence showing the tabulation room during the time election officials were tabulating and adjudicating ballots during both of those elections.

According to Rubinstein’s findings, “Report 3” incorrectly blames the presence of a second adjudication database to something besides human error. Something that Rubinstein’s investigation found was present in the 2020 general election as well as the April 2021 municipal election.

“The report claims in both elections, a second adjudication database, or session was created,” said Rubinstein. “That is not supposed to happen. During a normal election what is supposed to occur is an adjudication session is started at the beginning of the election, beginning the scanning all of the ballots and that is the same adjudication session that occurs throughout the entire election. During both of these elections, a second adjudication was started and was populated with files.”

According to Rubinstein’s investigation, the second adjudication database was directly caused by former Back Office Elections Manager, Sandra Brown. Rubinstein’s report stated “report 3” made allegations that it’s unlikely such an action could happen through human error and that there is no “function” or “feature” on the EMS server that could cause that to happen whether deliberately or accidently by any election officials. But rather, ‘’report 3’’ alleges it was more likely an external “trigger”, “signal” or “software algorithm”. In his report, Rubinstein said it was concluded that the presence of a second adjudication database was in fact human error, which was evident on surveillance footage.

During his presentation, Rubinstein showed footage of the tabulation room and said it was evident that there was some sort of problem with the computer system and the election officials were trying to get it sorted out. Video shows Sandra Brown sitting down to the computer, which is when Rubinstein and Struwe said she was trying to troubleshoot the system to get it back to working order.

Rubinstein in his report said, “Report 3” said election officials called Dominion support to figure out what was going on Oct. 21, 2020 and claimed the election officials had a strong of those events. The D.A report said despite the repeated claims that there was extensive questioning, investigators were unable to find a single person who said they were interviewed by the “Report 3” authors. Struwe interviewed 11 people who were in the tabulation room and all of them said they were never questioned. Sandra Brown was the only employee with administrative rights to the voting equipment and she declined through legal council to be interviewed by Struwe.

In his concluding summary Rubinstein writes:

“This investigation is being closed with no finding of probable cause that a crime was committed by any person. There appears to be anomalies in the election logs, caused by intentional actions of Sandra Brown, Elections Manager for the Mesa County Clerk’s Office. No evidence exists that would indicate that Ms. Brown had any nefarious or criminal motive in those actions, but rather appears to have been trouble-shooting problems in the flow of the adjudication process during the elections. These actions were verified to have been done by her through video evidence, corroboration of records, audit of randomly selected ballot images, interviews with witnesses and experts, and recreation of the certain scenarios using a test election environment and prove that the conclusions of Report 3 are incorrect claims of what may have occurred. At this time, no evidence suggests that these actions negatively impacted the election.”

KKCO News did reach out to Mesa County Clerk and Recorder, Tina Peters for comment on the investigation results, but received no response.

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