Is Colorado's elections chief too political? Jena Griswold fights criticism of Trump-focused partisanship

Griswold has defenders in Colorado. Amanda Gonzalez, Jefferson County’s clerk and recorder and a fellow Democrat, said she admires Griswold’s fiery dedication to shielding elections from those falsely claiming they are rigged or fraudulent.

She sees the role of a state’s top election official these days as being the “democracy-defender-in-chief.”

“She isn’t the first secretary of state to speak about the damage caused by President Trump,” Gonzalez said. “I appreciate a secretary of state who stands up to that and ensures that our system is safe and secure.”

Partisan roots in election oversight

The criticism of Griswold underlines the sometimes-partisan nature of election oversight, which most notably caught the public’s attention during the 2000 Bush v. Gore debacle. Then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who also served as George W. Bush’s state campaign co-chair, was accused of playing favorites after she certified the state’s razor-thin results for Bush over Al Gore.

Trump’s election loss 20 years later put the office into hyper-focus, highlighted by an early January 2021 phone call made by the then-president to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump, who was recorded, suggested that the Republican elections chief “find” more than 11,000 votes to ensure a Trump victory in the state won by Democrat Joe Biden.

“The secretary of state used to be a backwater — now it’s high profile,” said Kevin Johnson, executive director of the Bethesda, Maryland-based Election Reformers Network.

A big part of the problem rests with how election administration is run in the United States, Johnson said.

“They manage a process that is adversarial in nature and they need to be impartial in overseeing that process,” he said of election officials. “Voters want to see neutrality in the comportment of the leader of elections.”

Colorado is one of 31 states where the secretary of state is chosen in a statewide election. In another seven states, the governor or legislature appoints the secretary. In 10 states, a board of elections, rather than a secretary of state, oversees elections, while in Utah and Alaska, the lieutenant governor is the chief elections officer.

...continued

swipe to next page