Jena Griswold, current Colorado Secretary of State and now the Democratic Party winner in the primaries for Attorney General, is engaged in a very strange campaign. She faced three opponents in the primary, none of whom garnered more than around 15-17% of the vote and who attempted to defeat her based on her management style. However, none of them even acknowledged the national debate on who controls elections in the face of Trump's ongoing attempt to federalize elections and control the outcome on his behalf. Griswold served as the leader of the nation's Democratic Secretaries of State (at the state level) and did much to protect genuine voter integrity from election deniers and from Trump's attempt to seize control of the election process. State control of elections (not by the federal government) was granted in the Constitution.
In the primary this year, Griswold didn't raise the issue of who controls elections; the state Democratic Party didn't raise it; her opponents didn't raise it; and the GOP itself did not either. There is a very big elephant in the room that is getting tiptoed around, and I don't get it. Now, the same anti-Griswold campaign has appeared on social media today in time to kick off the general election in Colorado in November, in which Griswold is on the ballot for Attorney General. That line of attack failed before in the primary, and there is no reason to believe it will succeed in the general. They are while referring to a 5-year-old negative report on her management style and claim she hid it. What is at stake is a national story..This is a deep blue state. I, in all of my years in politics, have never seen anything like it when a state election's national implications are ignored as if they did not exist.
As a former election official myself, I have prided myself on supporting the clean election system that Colorado has (including that over 80% of ballots are "mailed in"). The mail-in system was constructed by GOP leadership and administered to the T by subsequent Secretaries of State, including Democrats like Griswold. Colorado has had the most controversial free elections in the US. Its mail-in system uses, I hear, FBI-trained handwriting clerks of both parties to verify the ballots, and it is considered the gold standard in the US. For that reason alone, Griswold deserves accolades for her administrative skills and adherence to the rule of law. For an alleged Gov. Polis or gubernatorial candidate/AG Phil Weiser or name identification for Griswold’s win in the primary, totally ignoring the elephant in the room: who controls elections- Trump or the state of Colorado. There was national focus on the big issue of whether election deniers could get away with grabbing the ballots and tabulation of the vote and sequestering them and giving authorized access to partisans because their allegiance was to Trump.. She disciplined county clerks for not following the carefully laid out rules of the state they were sworn to uphold on taking office. The most famous case was concerning Tina Peters. Griswold, with the help of the AG's office attorneys, beat Trump at his game. She had locked up the ballots in her county and gave access to a Trump partisan, putting up a co-worker to help her do it, and then covered it up with lies. This destroyed the chain of evidence and the required surveillance by others not in her party. Trump intervened to "free her" from a jury trial conviction, putting her in prison because she had committed a crime and a cover-up. Peters became Trump's icon of the ideal county clerk: "defy local rules and do as I say", instead. Now it is no secret that Trump wants all election officials to act like Peters and control the election count to his benefit. Peters is his role model. There appears to have been election deniers placed in official positions all over the country. In Colorado, all GOP candidates for state offices- AG, SOS, governor- are election deniers, sworn to rectify the "stolen 2020 election."
On the issue of Trump's demand that the details of all registered voters on state rolls be turned over to the feds, Griswold defied him, too, and that is another reason to admire her. Yesterday, Trump's demands to turn over voter rolls to the feds met their 23rd defeat in federal courts... as courts denied Trump's demand. We are now awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on Trump's demand to make the post office the agency to deny mail-in ballot delivery using those voter rolls. Trump has declared war on mail-in ballots, and that he uses them was yesterday’s headline. In the meantime, Trump has attempted to force Colorado to bend to his will by denying federal funds to Colorado, from food stamps to fighting wildfires, because we defied his demands as he tries to control the Nov midterm outcomes and lay the groundwork for another attempt to claim the election was stolen, as he told you in advance it was going to happen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/us/politics/a-growing-number-of-election-deniers-hold-key-local-roles-in-midterms.htm
lhttps://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/trump-threatened-colorado-funding-as-punishment-over-tina-peters-judge-finds/
https://coloradonewsline.com/briefs/trump-colorado-voter-data-federal-judge
/https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/analyzing-presidents-executive-order-mail-voting
How Colorado detects fraud: https://coloradonewsline.com/2024/10/24/fraudulent-ballots-mesa-county-colorado/
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