OP/ED Gazette July 29, 2025

LETTERS: Nancy Murray reply

Voting systems integrity

This letter is in response to Joe Loyall's letter dated July 23.

During Tina Peters' trial, she was not permitted to defend herself adequately. When she attempted to present evidence that her duties required her to take a backup copy of the election system before the required software update to preserve election data for the mandated 25 months in Colorado, the prosecution objected, and the judge sustained the objection. Most of her witnesses, including the individual who made the backup, were not allowed to testify.

Thanks to Tina's backups, we now know that the "Trusted Build" update overwrote all election data on every machine in the state, which is a violation of federal law. The Department of Justice has since requested all election data for federal elections in Colorado from 2020, 2022, and 2024 from the secretary of state.

I had the opportunity to observe a demonstration of the first backup copy of the Mesa County Dominion machine with the previous Colorado secretary of state. During the demonstration, we witnessed the database for the 2020 general election being accessed without entering a single password. Changes to the vote count between Joe Biden and Donald Trump were made, altering the winner and then changed back. None of these modifications were logged in the system - a serious violation for any system, especially one classified as "critical infrastructure." This configuration allowed anyone to access the equipment, change votes in the database, and leave no trace because no password was required, and changes were not recorded in the system log. This was the configuration in every county in Colorado during the 2020 election and may still be in place today. The secretary of state is aware of these vulnerabilities and exacerbated the problem by posting every BIOS password for every Colorado Dominion machine for months before the 2024 election. Had the individual escorted by Tina Peters and authorized by her to assist with the backup exploited the system, we would have no way of knowing because the election system does not log changes-a clear violation for any government system.

The Risk Limiting Audit is misleading. It is merely a small test to confirm if a limited number of ballots are correctly scanned and logged on the cast vote records (CVR), a large spreadsheet that records each vote on individual ballots in the order they were processed. I believe this can give the general public a false sense of security about the accuracy of vote recording. A true audit is not permitted by the secretary of state without her approval.

When Mr. Loyall asserts that "election integrity is something we can do ourselves," I argue that we lack the necessary skills and access to conduct election integrity during an election.

Nancy Murray

Colorado Springs