This campaign season, Colorado’s new mail-ballot voter law has drawn the national sideshow attention of cable news and opinion, AM radio and even a sting by conservative provocateur James O’Keefe — all focused on the notion that Tuesday’s outcome could be tainted.

But perception hasn’t been reality, according to election officials on both sides of the deep political divide who report only a routine percentage of challenged signatures, undeliverable ballots and reports of alleged shenanigans.

Mesa County Clerk Sheila Reiner said the lack of actual trouble is largely because voting by mail is nothing new. It’s been an option for Colorado voters since 1992. And in the 2012 general election, 73 percent of Coloradans cast mail ballots.

“What’s different is we have a party that’s made allegations of fraud part of its platform,” Reiner, a Republican who is president of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said of some members of her party.

Before Democrats in the legislature passed the new law in 2013, GOP leaders said sending ballots to every registered voter, including those who didn’t vote in the previous even-year general election, would be an invitation to fraud; the logic being mainly that people could find and use discarded or misdelivered ballots.

But clerks note that each ballot is screened to make sure the signatures match voter registration records. And so far the numbers of signatures that have been flagged by election judges as incorrect matches are roughly the same as they were in the 2012 general election in El Paso, Denver, Mesa and Pueblo counties checked by The Denver Post on Friday.

In Denver County, flagged signatures account for about 1 percent of ballots turned in, said Alton Dillard, spokesman for the clerk and recorder’s office.

Election judges checking signatures have no way of knowing which party the voter belongs to, and each voter whose ballot has been questioned so far has had the chance to correct it, he said. Some voters — such as those with questioned ballots, deployed military members or state residents voting from overseas — have eight days from the final day of voting for their ballot to be counted. Others must get their ballot in by 7 p.m. Tuesday.

In addition to safeguards, voter fraud is a felony that carries a penalty of up to three years in jail and a $100,000 fine for each misused ballot.

El Paso County’s clerk and recorder, Wayne Williams, the Republican nominee for secretary of state, appeared on the Fox News Channel on Tuesday night to talk about his concerns that a ballot in every household, regardless of what the voter prefers, would open the way for undue influence by others in the home.

“We haven’t seen any significant issues in this county,” he said Friday. “We’ve seen a couple of incidents, but we’re dealing with them.”

As of Friday, 133,285 ballots had been returned in El Paso County. On 326 ballots, the signature did not appear to match registration records. In 104 other cases, the voter forgot to sign the ballot, and on 198, the voter registration form had not been fully completed.

“I suspect most of them are legitimate,” Williams said.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler was a dogged opponent of the election law. His office said Friday that it had heard of no problems, other than in Pueblo County. A man there posted on Facebook that he would buy blank ballots for $5 each. The sheriff’s department contacted the man who posted the offer, but he said he was only joking.

“To get to the punishment, you have to have someone detecting it and reporting it, and you have to have someone willing to prosecute it,” Gessler said, referring to local election officials and county prosecutors. “That hasn’t been the case.”

A national database of voter fraud cases, compiled by the News21 initiative at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, found that Colorado has had 22 election-fraud cases since 2000.

Voters were accused in 15 cases, followed by third-party organizations in three cases, election workers twice and one other person who was charged with petition fraud. In 19 cases, those responsible took plea deals. In 12 of the cases, the accusation was for voting twice.

Gessler said his office put forth “a herculean effort” for this year’s election to develop an electronic pollbook that allows every election office in the state to instantly determine if someone has already cast a vote in another precinct anywhere in the state.

He also has offered training and other state resources for smaller counties with scant money for training to help interpret the new system.

“Some things you can address, and some things you can’t,” he said.

Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174, jbunch@denverpost.com or twitter.com/joeybunch