If you happen to be a journalist or just a plain old citizen in Colorado, you have a legal right to ask for information under the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA).

Unless you happen to live here in Basalt—in this bucolic town where the waters of the Frying Pan and Roaring Fork Rivers happily commingle to produce year-round, world-class, gold-medal flyfishing.

Unless you happen to be Mary Kenyon, a marketing guru who lives in Basalt, does consulting work for the Town, has a law degree, and had the temerity to ask for all communications—before and after election day in April 2016—between Mayor Jacque Whitsitt and Town Clerk Pamela Schilling, when Whitsitt was a candidate for Mayor and Schilling’s duties included being designated Election Clerk.

The week before the election, Schilling complained to other workers at Town Hall that “Jacque is driving me crazy with all her election texts.”

Whitsitt defeated Rick Stevens by only 21 votes in a bitter election about the future of a town now sitting on a plum piece of downtown riverfront property ready for redevelopment. Any election shenanigans, no matter how small, may have been enough to swing the vote in Whitsitt’s favor.

“If this election process continues to be flawed,” Kenyon said. “Why would anyone vote? I started this journey to assess the mistakes being made.”

Citing CORA, Kenyon asked for all the records, including emails and text messages, but there was a problem—a big one—because both the Mayor and the Town Clerk had deleted all the text messages between them, violating the CORA law by not producing the records—a misdemeanor—and compounding their potential problem by destroying the records.

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