WASHINGTON — Colorado’s top election official said Friday that itap up to state leaders to rebuild trust in the U.S. voting system in the face of President Donald Trump’s unsupported assertion that millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election.
“The initial claim (from Trump) undermines the confidence, but if you take the resulting commission — or whatever it is — and you use that, then you can actually increase it,” said Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, referring to a new election panel launched by the White House.
Trump has said repeatedly, and without evidence, that he would have won the popular vote for president were if not for illegal ballots — a claim by election officials and experts. Even so, Trump has put Vice President Mike Pence to investigate those claims.
Williams, a Republican, did not directly criticize Trump — or his plans to begin an investigation — during a panel discussion of election experts held Friday a few blocks from the White House.
But afterward, Williams described as overstated Trump’s claim that millions of ballots were cast illegally.
“I think people who say that there were millions — insofar as Colorado goes — are wrong,” Williams said.
To prevent an erosion of voter trust, he said election officials must go out of their way to be as transparent was possible.
“All of us have to continue to say ‘How can we make it better?’ We cannot simply say ‘Everything is fine, leave us alone’ and then stick our head in a bunker and hope everybody goes away,” he said. “We have to be engaged.”
Last month, his office released statistics from the 2016 election that showed only a small fraction of ballots were flagged for problems. About 21,000 ballots were rejected from the Nov. 8 contest — compared to . Of those, about 2,600 didn’t provide identification, another 2,600 didn’t have a signature and another 16,000 had signatures that didn’t match those on file.
Election malfeasance in Colorado is incredibly rare. Between January 2012 and early November 2016, there were 32 charges of various voting offenses, according to statistics compiled by the Colorado District Attorneys Council. Those resulted in four convictions.