Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold stops in Aspen to talk election security ahead of 2024 vote
The Aspen Times
Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily archive
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold stopped in Aspen on her way back to Denver after meeting with Mesa County officials over recent charges related to an election security breach and government obstruction against former Clerk Tina Peters — so election integrity was top of mind.
With the 2024 presidential election less than two years away, Griswold is already working on a slew of election protection legislation bills, the 2023 Colorado Votes Act, to safeguard what she said are the biggest threats to election security: disinformation, foreign interference, and obstructed access.
“One of the biggest threats is actually not hacking or anything like that. It’s a coordinated effort to try to decrease Americans’ confidence in our elections that started with our foreign adversaries,” she said. “All the election lies are used as justification to suppress the voting rights across the country, hundreds of voter suppression bills have passed. They’re used as a justification to try to steal elections when candidates don’t win.”
Election workers, who are experiencing record burnout, frequently bear that burden. In conjunction with county clerks, Griswold led a 2022 state law that criminalized retaliation against election workers to better protect them from threats. Conspiracy theorists and disinformation are her current focus.
“Election workers have been directly threatened. They face insider threats, they face people screaming at them and intimidating them. And across the nation, we have seen them step down. As part of the attack on democracy they threaten good people — Republicans and Democrats — so they don’t feel safe doing their job, get them to step down, and get untrained or even worse, conspiracy theorists, in their place.”
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As it stands in Colorado law, a candidate can request any amount of discretionary recounts following an election, so long as they pay for it. Griswold calls that law out as an opportunity to sow disinformation and exhaust already stretched election workers. She proposed a cap on the margin of loss at which a candidate could request a campaign-funded recount.
“There is a point where the margin is so big between the winner and loser that a recount is not going to make a difference,” she said. “And so it suddenly becomes a burden, a burden that can be used to drive further election denialism and destabilization of elections.”
She has met some pushback in the state Legislature, according to reporting from The Colorado Sun, regarding her proposed recount cap. She noted that a double-digit margin of loss is an unacceptable number for recounts but also proposed a 2% margin for discretionary recounts. Ultimately, she said, the percentage threshold is less important than actually implementing some kind of cap.
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“I do believe in the right to recount if the races are close. We should do recounts. Even if the races are not within the mandatory recount, a candidate should have the option if they truly believe something’s going on,” she said. “But (not) if you lose by double digits, or really, you’re predominantly looking at an attempt to fuel conspiracies.”
In the 2022 midterm elections, Aspenite Adam Frisch shocked the district and nation when he nearly unseated firebrand conservative Lauren Boebert for the 3rd Congressional District House seat.
That razor-thin margin triggered the state’s automatic recount for elections with a less than 0.5% margin of victory. Frisch has already announced he will run against Boebert again and should a future margin of victory exceed 0.5%, Griswold’s desired recount cap could affect candidates’ options.
Other components of her proposed elections package include a requirement for counties of 10,000-plus voters to start counting ballots four days ahead of Election Day to ensure timely results. As of May, Pitkin County has 13,642 active registered voters.
Expanding access to historically-suppressed voter blocks — specifically the Mountain Ute and Southern Ute Indian tribes — is also a priority in the proposed act. It would establish a process to allow tribal membership lists to be used for automatic voter registration and guarantee early voting on tribal lands on the Friday, Saturday, and Monday before an election, as well as on Election Day.
The No. 1 tool that officials like her have to protect confidence in elections is letting voters know that they are targets of election-related lies and telling them where to find trusted information — like a county clerk, FBI, DHS, or other trusted sources. Though for someone who already distrusts the government, a path to regaining that trust is less clear.
“We just have to remain vigilant that an attack on one person’s fundamental freedoms is an attack on all of us,” she said. “So we have to continue to protect all of our freedoms and democracy in this country.”
