They disabled the security cameras and did something with election equipment, which is now set aside as evidence.
They need to investigate. This would have happened if it was a paper voting machine or a ballot box with votes in it.
This isn’t a “conspiracy theorists are correct” moment. This is a show that the voting system does indeed have protections and supervision around it that identities tampering and resets the supply chain.
This is why people get uncomfortable with vote counting taking too long or ballots being moved and stored before counting is done. The accountability is gone and whoever controls the process has the ability to tamper.
If these machines need to be observed at all times to prevent tampering, just forget about it. It's unrealistic. Even if they can be protected the public can't trust that, the only people who could truly confirm that would be the people who are in the position to tamper with them.
The Mesa County Clerk wasn't trying to hide what they were doing. If any other County Clerk wanted to tamper and not hide, well we wouldn't be having this discussion because no one would know about it, even if there is a video feed on the machines. Has this happened anywhere else? Can you, as a citizen, confirm no other voting machines in Colorado (or elsewhere) have been tampered with?
The Mesa County clerk is indeed trying to hide what she did. I believe she's on the lam, and in hiding right now. It looks to me like the Mesa County clerk took it upon herself to foul the process in illegal ways because the CO procedures worked, despite whatever legal things that Clerk could do. This seems like a pretty standard technique for overthrowing a democratically-elected government: manufacture a scandal, throw out the real results, put in fake results, pass new laws preventing any of your political opponents from taking office ever again.
We're at the "manufacture a scandal" stage.
Not counting votes is a compromise favouring the party that ran the election.
You shouldn't put them away and start the next day, sure, but you should definitely not stop counting
There's no way that any procedure would have satisfied the current crop of... conspiracy theorists... because they were determined to find something to overturn the election of some candidates. Tina Peters is a case in point. She violated the procedures.
There's probably voting systems that some ideological adversaries could oversee that I would be OK with - the current CO system comes close. Like I say, I'm a CO resident, and I looked into it.
That said, you should google for Ken Buck, a north central CO Representative. You can find audio recording of him pressuring the Republican Party equivalent of Clerk and Recorder to illegally change election results. Why he's still got his seat in Congress is beyond me.
If having access to the machines means that you can affect the results of the elections, and the public cannot safely audit that, then these machines are unusable at all times.
You trust the Secretary of State. You think everyone in the state and country should trust the CO Secretary of State. Fine. But eventually an untrustworthy person gets to that seat of power, it's naive to think corrupt people wouldn't try and succeed. And from that point on they decide election results, and only other corrupt, complicit people run the government. The only real skill they need is to appear trustworthy, as grifters are already good at doing.
The conspiracy theorists just think this has already happened.
We should have a voting system that you would feel comfortable to be overseen by your ideological adversaries.