6 people accused of forging signatures of dead people to get a Republican candidate on the ballot in Colorado

• Six people have been accused of forging ballot signatures using the names of dead people, officials say.
• The people worked for a company that circulated a petition to get a Republican candidate on the ballot, according to court documents.
• Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said her office rejected an “unprecedented” number of signatures.

Six people are accused of forging dead people’s signatures to get a Republican candidate on the ballot in time for congressional primaries, Colorado’s attorney general announced.

Alex Joseph, Terris Kintchen, Patrick Rimpel, Jordahni Rimpel, Aliyah Moss, and Diana Watt all face one felony count of attempt to influence a public servant and one misdemeanor count of perjury, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a release Tuesday.

According to a court affidavit, the six people worked for the petitioning company Grassfire LLC, which was hired by Carl Andersen’s campaign to circulate a petition to gather 1,500 signatures necessary for Andersen to be put on the 2022 Republican primary ballot for the US House of Representatives.

The document says Chris Byrne, a criminal investigator for the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, reviewed the petition and found that the six petitioners had collected signatures of at least 21 deceased people.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office rejected the petition because it “lacked the necessary 1,500 valid voter signatures to be included on the ballot,” Byrne wrote in the affidavit.

“Through its internal screening processes, SOS determined there was an unusually high number of signatures on the Andersen petition that did not match voter signatures in SOS files,” Byrne wrote.

According to the document, Byrne also found “numerous examples” of names, signatures, and addresses that appeared multiple times in different handwriting in different parts of the petition.

In total, the Secretary of State’s Office rejected 3,417 of the 4,462 signatures turned in by Andersen, Secretary of State Jena Griswold said. Out of the rejected signatures, 1,967 failed to match those on file for the listed voters, 900 were signatures where the name did not appear to be a Colorado voter, and 21 were signatures where the listed voter had died prior to the date of the signature, Griswold said.

Griswold’s office also found irregularities in a petition that the same petitioners worked on for another candidate, and referred the matter to Weiser’s office and the offices of the Jefferson County and Denver attorneys general for further investigation.

The extent of the alleged fraud was so prolific that it caused the state secretary of state’s office to reject an “unprecedented” number of signatures, Griswold said.

Andersen is not suspected of any wrongdoing and Weiser’s office has found no evidence of criminal misconduct by Grassfire LLC, Weiser said on Tuesday.