AP Photo/David Zalubowski
- For nearly a decade, Colorado has automatically mailed a ballot to every registered voter.
- Officials boast that the system is a "gold standard" for administering elections.
- But after 2020, the bipartisan consensus has begun to erode.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Jena Griswold was 34 years old when, in her first run for office back in 2018, she defeated a Republican incumbent to become the top elections official in Colorado, the first Democrat to hold the position in six decades and the youngest secretary of state in the nation.
Two years later, Griswold helped administer a presidential election – in a place where all voters receive a ballot in the mail – that state and national officials deemed "the most secure in American history."
Joe Biden won Colorado by more than 439,000 votes and, with it, the presidency. But the groundwork for discrediting his victory had been laid months before. When voters made their choice, the lying hit a fever pitch: about widespread fraud; about fake ballots, maybe from China, being added to the tally in the middle of the night; about officials, left and right, rigging the vote against an incumbent.
In an interview, Griswold said she now fears for her safety.
"I'm not alone in that," she said. Across the country, "Democratic secretaries of state have received all types of death threats." Republicans, too.
In Arizona, Katie Hobbs, that state's Democratic elections official, was recently provided a state security detail after being threatened over her criticism of the partisan "audit" taking place in Maricopa County, where a private third party, Cyber Ninjas, has been given free rein by the GOP-led state senate over 2.1 million ballots - a majority of them cast for President Biden - in an apparent effort, dismissed by a bipartisan group of experts as not credible, to fit the facts to the pro-Trump conspiracy theories.
Griswold is part of a bipartisan group of elections officials urging Congress to provide billions of dollars to shore up state and local voting infrastructure ("elections cost money"). But the biggest threat to the security of democracy, she said, is something else: disinformation.
In 2016, the Russian government worked to tilt the election in Donald Trump's favor, as well as to sow doubt about the integrity of any vote he lost. It did so again in 2020.
But stateside, "elected officials really embraced the use of lies to try to manipulate Americans voters," Griswold said.
"The lies are creating violence. The lies are creating threats," she said. It is those elected officials, more than any foreign adversary, that she sees as threatening the integrity of the US political system. The push for "fraudulent audits," in Arizona and elsewhere, is to Griswold perhaps the most glaring example of officials who know better engaging in bad faith to better position themselves for the next GOP primary.
"The blatant abuse of political seats for these elected officials' personal gain is incredibly dangerous to our democracy, but also to election workers," she said. "That is, hands down, my number one concern."
It has included misleading the public over the very right to vote. In Georgia, when Republicans passed a new elections law that requires mail-in voters to provide an ID every time they cast a ballot - citing the need to address fraud that was never uncovered - they pointed to Colorado as if it were a model they were following. But Colorado only requires proof of identification once, at registration, the standard Republicans embraced in the early 2000s, and it accepts utility bills, not just government forms of ID. And, as of 2019, residents are now automatically registered to vote anytime they get a driver's license.
"It's absolutely ridiculous to compare Colorado's gold-standard voter model to Georgia's voter suppression model," Griswold told Insider. Even before the new restrictions, some voters in Georgia, particularly in urban areas, could expect to wait hours in line; in Colorado, the average wait time is seven minutes - and there's no prohibition on giving them water.
But false claims of voter fraud are being used around the country to impose such new restrictions. The threat to democracy, again, is coming from within.
"What we're seeing is insider political actors use voter suppression as a tool to steal future elections," Griswold said. "And that is the most un-American and corrupting thing you can do."
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