BY FREDA MIKLIN
GOVERNMENTAL REPORTER
Besides being a recruiting career coach, Caroline Cornell is the board chair of Girl Scouts of Colorado. She also holds a master’s degree in history from University College-London and would also like to be the next Arapahoe County Clerk.
Cornell told The Villager, “We have restricted access to services from the Clerk’s Office right now. If you are someone who doesn’t look at the website, doesn’t read all the words and all the pages, you show up to a location of the Arapahoe County Clerk’s office to renew your car tag, and you get sent home or to a kiosk.”
She shared the experience of a neighbor whose daughter got a traffic ticket for driving with an expired sticker on her license plate. When the neighbor tried to buy an up-to-date sticker, she was told she had to make an appointment, but there were no appointments available for three weeks thus her only options were to risk her daughter being ticketed again or to not drive the car. Cornell said, “That is happening right here in Arapahoe County. People are really frustrated. Communications are not good. Many people want to be able to access services in person to solve problems as they occur, and they are not allowed to do so.” She said that she and many others also find the Arapahoe County Clerk website very difficult to navigate, adding to the level of frustration.
If elected, Cornell would open up the Arapahoe County Clerk’s offices to the public and have a staff member available to greet customers and make sure they are directed to someone who can help them. She would also increase the level of training for people who work in the Clerk’s Office to ensure that they are able to serve the public’s needs effectively.
Cornell has confidence that the state’s voting systems are safe and secure, pointing to the signature verification system as an important tool in ensuring that voters fill out their own ballots. Still, she believes more needs to be done to assure voters that their ballots are being handled correctly. She explained, “I think we have an opportunity to improve how we communicate about our elections in order to give the public confidence in the system. That is the responsibility of leadership and we could do a much better job in Arapahoe County than we are presently.”
Cornell would also increase transparency by making scanned ballots available to the public upon request after elections are held, without including any information that would identify the voter of the ballot.
If elected, Cornell would “finally clean up the voter rolls,” by carefully removing names of voters who have not cast ballots from the address listed for years because they no longer live at that address. Estimating that thousands of ballots are sent out during each election that are wasted, Cornell offered, “I think that there’s an opportunity to figure out a better system, to make sure that if you’re receiving a ballot at your home that you shouldn’t be receiving, it doesn’t go on indefinitely.”
Caroline Cornell is running against incumbent Arapahoe County Clerk Joan Lopez in the November election. She was also a candidate for State House District 37 in 2020, losing to State Rep. Tom Sullivan.
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