COLORADO, USA — Six people are accused of forging signatures in attempt to get a Republican candidate on the primary ballot for the 7th Congressional District (CD7), according to the Colorado Attorney General's office.
According to court documents, the charged individuals — Alex Joseph, Terris Kintchen, Patrick Rimpel, Jordahni Rimpel, Aliyah Moss, and Diana Watt — were paid circulators employed by the Oregon-based professional petitioning firm Grassfire, LLC.
The firm was hired by the Carl Andersen for Congress campaign to circulate a petition to gather the necessary 1,500 valid signatures for Andersen to be placed on the Republican primary ballot.
The six people charged each signed forms indicating that they they gathered signatures from people who signed the petition in their presence.
According to the Colorado Secretary of State's Office (SOS), an "unprecedented number of signatures" were rejected for Anderson.
Out of the 4,462 lines turned in by the candidate, 3,417 were rejected and the petition was deemed insufficient.
Of those rejected signatures, 1,967 were found not to match the signatures on file for the listed voters. In 900 instances, the name given in the petition did not appear to be a Colorado voter.
Andersen briefly sued to have a judge deemed more signatures valid to put him on the ballot. A lawsuit that did not proceed.
“We suspected at that time that there were signature concerns. Frankly, that’s the reason he was insufficient because there were so many concerns with signatures," said Democratic Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “This case does show that our system does work."
Griswold referred the petition signatures to the attorney general's office for review.
“Before this case was referred to criminal prosecution, we had a trained professional in signatures look at the petition," Griswold said.
Court documents show that investigators contacted numerous people whose names appeared on the petition. Many of them said the handwriting and signatures were not theirs.
“It's, kind of, like a photo identification or some kind of lineup being like, 'is this your signature?' And I confirm none of them were there," Golum Maruf said.
Maruf is one of the voters whose name and signature showed up on a petition that he said he did not sign. Four times. Four different signature collectors are accused of each forging Maruf's signature.
And it would be impossible for him to have signed any of the petitions in Jefferson County in 2022.
"I lived in Colorado up until 2019. So, I left," Maruf said.
“I got a phone call asking if I signed a petition with respect to CD7, and I really had no idea what he was talking about," Pete Weir said.
Another name and signature on the petition was that of Peter Weir. If there is one name you might not want to forge in Jefferson County, it might be the name of the former prosecutor.
“I'm Pete Weir, and I was the elected District Attorney for the First Judicial District, which is Jefferson and Gilpin counties," Weir said.
The SOS office said 21 signatures were from voters who had passed away prior to the date of the signature in the petition. Additional signatures were rejected for various other reasons.
After finding the pattern of rejections for one candidate, the SOS noticed a similar, albeit lower, number of petition signature irregularities in a separate candidate petition on which the same petition circulators worked.
When investigators contacted Watt, who was later arrested in the case, she told them that she used to work for Grassfire, but that the company told her "circulators cheated and committed fraud in Colorado" and she lost her job over it.
She also stated, according to the court documents, that "my name is on some petitions that are very bad."
Watt said a circulator came to Colorado from Miami but had to return to Miami for an emergency before the signatures she had gathered were notarized.
Watt claimed a company owner told her to sign her name to the petitions collected by the other person even though she had not done any of the "actual petitioning for the Andersen campaign." Investigators later spoke with that owner who denied telling her to sign the petitions or even suggesting that her signing them was a viable option.
Watt said, according to the indictment, that she signed the petitions and didn't know until afterward that there were sections with fraudulent signatures. She insisted Grassfire was not at fault, and said the circulators hired committed the fraud.
All defendants are charged with one count of attempt to influence a public servant, a class four felony, and one count of perjury, a class two misdemeanor.
No wrongdoing by Andersen is suspected, and the Attorney General’s Office found no criminal misconduct by Grassfire.
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