After a months-long court battle, Colorado officials have finally retrieved hard drives containing data that was smuggled from a county’s voting machines. But it’s still unclear who accessed that data—or what a conspiracy-promoting set of Coloradans hope to do with it.
Following a court order last Wednesday, Dallas Schroeder, clerk of Elbert County, Colorado, returned two hard drives containing his county’s election machine data. Schroeder previously testified that he copied the sensitive data last August, with help from a pair of Colorado conspiracy theorists linked to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Schroeder says he initially gave one copy of the data to his attorney John Case, and another to an unnamed lawyer.
That unnamed lawyer’s identity was revealed to a judge under seal last week. Meanwhile, conspiracy theorists claim to have reviewed Elbert County voting machine data, even citing it in court.
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Schroeder, who did not return a request for comment, is the second Colorado clerk accused of breaching voting machines under his supervision. The other clerk, Tina Peters of Mesa County, is currently facing a barrage of criminal charges for allegedly stealing a local tech worker’s identity, illegally copying her county’s election data, and leaking it to election fraud conspiracy theorists last spring. She later appeared at Lindell’s “cyber symposium” on supposed voter fraud where she implied, incorrectly, that the stolen data suggested election malfeasance against Donald Trump.
Two weeks after the symposium, Schroeder made copies of similar elections data in his own county. Surveillance footage, reported by Reuters last month, shows Schroeder “fiddling with cables and typing on his phone as he copied computer drives containing sensitive voting information.”
Some of Schroeder’s communications that day were with Shawn Smith and Mark Cook, a pair of election truthers who have promoted their conspiracy theories on Lindell’s “Lindell TV” webshow. Smith, who has previously stated that Colorado’s secretary of state “deserve[s] to hang” if involved in election fraud, also leads Cause of America, a Lindell-backed election denialism group. Schroder testified that he copied the voting machine data using a “Logic Cube Forensic Falcon Neo Device,” a $4,000 device that he borrowed from and subsequently returned to Cook.
Schroeder also testified that on Sept. 2, he returned to make a second copy of the data, which he gave to an attorney whom he has so far refused to publicly name. He was allowed to give the attorney’s name to a judge under seal last week, preventing the person’s name from entering the public record.
Although Schroeder testified that no one had accessed his own copy of the election data, the leaked information has nevertheless become fodder for conspiracy theorists who claim the breach might contain information that finally proves election fraud.
A U.S. flag flies at the office of Clerk Dallas Schroeder in Kiowa, Colorado, on March 17.
Alexandra Ulmer/ReutersStop The Steal types in Colorado have called for breaches of voting machines on the basis of a conspiracy theory that falsely accuses state officials of wiping those machines. (Peters, the Mesa County clerk, also cited the theory in her alleged breach of voting machines.) Schroeder, along with a small group of fellow Republican clerks, invoked the conspiracy theory in their own lawsuit against state officials in November. Ironically, Schroeder’s own affidavit in that case revealed that he had made unauthorized copies of his county’s election machine data.
Following the revelation of the Elbert County leak in January, fringe bloggers have implied without proof that figures in the conspiracy world had reviewed the data. But one such recent claim appeared in a less-obscure source: a Lindell-backed lawsuit by a pair of Arizona political figures.
Lindell is underwriting a lawsuit by Arizona state representative Mark Finchem and Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, the Arizona Republic reported. The suit seeks to bar the use of electronic voting machines, which have become a fixation of election truthers. An initial complaint in the case, filed late last month, claimed to cite data from both Mesa County and Elbert County voting machines as evidence that those machines were unreliable.
“Dominion Democracy Suite software was used to tabulate votes in 62 Colorado counties, including Mesa County and Elbert County, during the 2020 election,” the original complaint read. “Subsequent examination of equipment from Mesa County and Elbert County showed the Democracy Suite software created unauthorized databases on the hard drive of the election management system servers.”
Never mind that the Mesa County election data did not show foul play—the Elbert County data is not supposed to be public at all, and not even conspiracy theorists have made concrete claims about what it supposedly reveals.
Reached for comment on Monday, Lake and Finchem’s attorney, Andrew Parker, did not clarify the source of the supposed Elbert County data.
On April 4, Lake and Finchem amended their complaint. An updated version of the complaint now only names Mesa County.
