A new 2020 election conspiracy theory has emerged from Arapahoe County — and while the issue itself is explainable, Clerk Joan Lopez’s characteristically bungled response rolled out the welcome mat.

The theory centers on an updated 2020 record published in April — a spreadsheet showing how the voting system interpreted each vote on each ballot.

Yale University assistant professor of political science, Shiro Kuriwaki, flagged discrepancies in the published spreadsheet last October, four years after the 2020 elections. Lopez’s office didn’t fix the file until this April and stayed silent until May, after conspiracists started spinning.

Colorado theorist Mark Cook called it “mysterious” and “bizarre.” A random Yale professor spots problems in a Colorado county. Months later, they quietly fix it and wait to publicize it? His theory: 15.8 million votes were “shuffled around,” with some 350,000 ballots affected by the alleged manipulation.

The theory’s details come down to classic conspiracy innuendo — spinning spreadsheet errors into evidence of covering up vote manipulation. The updated file only affects the version that gets published, with required redactions — not the official records. Vote totals are unchanged. Ballots aren’t affected.

In response to my emailed questions to Lopez and spokesman Tom Skelley, Arapahoe County explained that, after comparing the original public version to a copy of the original unredacted file, “It was readily apparent that data and formatting in the spreadsheet were mistakenly moved.”

The county had failed to delete 15 traceable voter records for small precincts that could breach ballot secrecy — routine privacy work mandated by the state. They accidentally scrambled other data when following state recommendations to shuffle content for added privacy protection, apparently causing mismatches among precincts.

The real scandal isn’t a genuinely faulty spreadsheet or alleged vote manipulation. It’s that Lopez let something so mundane become another failure of crisis management — another case of the coverup being worse than the mistake.

When they quietly posted a brief explanation on May 13 — just two sentences — it was woefully insufficient. It said the errors were discovered last October and likely reflected “mistakes made during the redaction process.” County election staff reviewed and confirmed Kuriwaki’s “hypothesis,” they added, then did a fresh redaction and uploaded the correct version around April 2.

They didn’t explain what “redaction process” means or that they’re required by law so as to not sacrifice voter anonymity. Nor did they publicly explain — as they did in response to me — that “15 rows of the report across 5 ballot types (unique combinations of the ballots’ precincts, contests and ballot measures…)” should have been redacted that weren’t properly redacted in the original report.

The county justifies the delay by claiming they had post-election tasks to complete for the 2024 elections before they could fix the 2020 problem. Except most of those tasks would have been done before Thanksgiving, leaving four full months to fix a 4-year-old error.

Of course, an investigation is essential before making public statements — but you can’t just wait until somebody else publicly flags the problem to come clean.

“Be the one to say it first, say it yourself — because otherwise someone else is writing the story and creating the narrative or guiding the narrative, and you’re not,” said crisis strategist Roshini Rajkumar, host of “The Crisis Files” podcast.

It’s “a basic tenet of crisis reaction and crisis management,” Rajkumar stressed, adding that failing to do so “just sets up quite a domino effect that’s usually not in your favor — especially in this day and age, when everybody’s looking to find fault or get their own 15 minutes of fame.”

Let’s be real: Lopez knows full well the conspiratorial era we’re living in. She knows conspiracy theorists have been examining these county records since 2020 — Arapahoe’s is now “evidence” in an out-of-state lawsuit — yet fixing this obvious error just wasn’t a priority.

Last year, when Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office inadvertently leaked confidential election computer passwords last year, county clerks weren’t even informed. She said nothing — and didn’t take any action — until the story broke. The coverup was worse than the incident.

Why can’t Griswold or Lopez simply address these issues immediately, publicly and proactively? Instead, they feed conspiracy theories.

“When we make a mistake, we are transparent about it, and we correct it,” the county insisted.

Nonsense. They removed the file and posted the new one without telling the public.

When they did, they posted an exceedingly vague statement — and only after they were found out. Even on something genuinely innocuous, they’ve done nothing to allay reasonable concerns about what happened.

In the years since Lopez took office in 2019, I’ve documented her repeated failures, hyper-partisanship and inability to answer basic questions about elections. (Anyone remember her infamous 9News flub?)

Arapahoe’s clerk has repeatedly dismissed opportunities to foster greater confidence in elections. This latest crisis management failure perfectly demonstrates Hanlon’s Razor: “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.”

Lopez may be a hyper-partisan Democrat, but she’s not capable of orchestrating election theft. She can’t even handle a spreadsheet error without creating a conspiracy theory gold mine.

Jimmy Sengenberger is an investigative journalist, public speaker, and longtime local talk-radio host. Reach Jimmy online at Jimmysengenberger.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @SengCenter.