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

Johnson’s organization has sketched out a way to reduce, if not eliminate, partisanship from election administration by forming a bipartisan state election board that includes members with legal and election expertise.

“Our elections officials are elected in partisan elections — no other democratic country in the world does that,” Johnson said. “The reason no other country does that is it leads to conflicts of interest.”

In a poll conducted by the American Politics Research Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, released in January, just 52% of Coloradans surveyed thought elections across the country would be run “fairly and accurately” in 2024. The numbers improved when respondents were asked about the state’s upcoming elections — 68% felt they would be fair and accurate.

But there was a stark partisan split, with 88% of Democrats saying Colorado’s elections would be run fairly and 63% of independents saying so. Only 54% of Republicans felt that way.

CU political science professor Anand Edward Sokhey, who oversaw the survey, said he found “the partisan gaps on electoral confidence concerning.” But tracing the exact causes of such disparities in sentiment is difficult, he said, if not impossible.

Eyeing higher office?

Former state GOP party chair Dick Wadhams, like Griswold, is no fan of Trump. He also disagrees with Republican attempts to recall or impeach Griswold.

But he has tough words for the secretary of state.

“In many ways, I think she is as irresponsible as the stolen election conspiracy crowd on the Republican side,” Wadhams said. “She should be restoring trust in the process.”

Griswold, he said, is so baldly partisan that she has disrupted the long, staid tradition of secretaries of state in Colorado, where the function of the office largely took precedence over who was leading it.

Not that all her predecessors were quiet bureaucrats. Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler ran into ethics problems and raised Democratic hackles during his tenure a decade ago — even launching an unsuccessful 2014 bid for governor.

But in Wadhams’ view, Gessler was a “rank amateur compared to Jena Griswold” in terms of partisanship. He surmises that a desire for higher office could be behind Griswold’s approach.

Asked if she had future political ambitions, Griswold said she was “locked in and focused on this election cycle.”

Gonzalez, the Jeffco clerk, said Griswold brought substantial improvements to Colorado’s election system, such as expanding access to voting for eligible voters — with more drop boxes and voting centers, heightened security and a statewide ballot-tracking system.

“I ran for this office because I wanted to protect the right to vote,” Gonzalez said.

Griswold, she said, also has been front and center when it comes to extending protections to county clerks who had come under fire during the tumultuous aftermath of the 2020 election. She championed a bill two years ago that made it a crime to threaten election officials or publish their personal information online.

Griswold said she wouldn’t back down in the face of criticism, noting that she was reelected by voters by a comfortable margin in 2022. She will be term-limited in 2026.

“We are only here because Donald Trump lost the election in 2020. He refused to accept the result and tried to steal the election from the American people,” she said. “There’s no mistaking what he did — we all watched it unfold on Jan. 6. And I can’t be silent when the future of our democracy is at stake.”

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