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

It’s no secret that Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state since 2019, has a significant downside with former President Donald Trump.

A fast scroll by way of her account on X, previously referred to as Twitter, reveals dozens of condemnations of the previous president, with Griswold repeatedly calling him an “oath-breaking insurrectionist” and a “menace to democracy.”

“It’s as much as American voters to avoid wasting our nation subsequent November and vote for democracy over chaos,” she posted on Nov. 30.

These sentiments discover broad help in Colorado politics, which largely has been hostile to Trump. However the outspokenness of the Democratic secretary of state — each on social media and in quite a few interviews on cable information — doesn’t play effectively with those that count on a extra even-handed strategy from Colorado’s high election official, particularly in a yr when Trump is on the poll once more for president.

Griswold’s social media posts generate loads of pushback, and these days Colorado Republicans have gone after her extra aggressively, together with by launching a doomed impeachment bid. Additionally they have criticized her choice to help an try to take away Trump from the poll in a Colorado case the U.S. Supreme Court docket lately overturned.

Wayne Williams, a Republican who preceded Griswold as secretary of state and misplaced to her within the 2018 election, says there is no such thing as a query his 39-year-old successor loudly and boldly wears her liberal politics on her sleeve. She often expresses help for abortion rights, gun management laws and transgender rights in her official capability as secretary of state.

Griswold additionally has lambasted U.S. Home Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican, as an election denier. Williams understands why some voters is perhaps uncomfortable with that.

“It makes it very troublesome for folks to consider all the pieces’s honest if you find yourself on a full-out assault on candidates they help,” he mentioned. “I consider her partisan actions undermine the boldness of voters’ religion within the workplace.”

However Griswold mentioned in an interview that her vocal criticism of Trump was intrinsically linked to her obligation to defend the integrity of Colorado’s elections.

“Will I grow to be quiet? The reply is totally not,” she mentioned. “We’re in an unprecedented and harmful political local weather. It’s not partisan or political to guard our democracy.”

Threats towards Griswold

Essentially the most fervent criticism from Colorado Republicans has come because the U.S. Supreme Court docket early this month overruled the Colorado excessive courtroom’s December choice to strike Trump from the Republican main poll. Griswold wasn’t among the many plaintiffs within the case, however she’d filed a short in help.

On March 4, Republican U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert threatened to pursue a recall marketing campaign towards Griswold. Days later, state Home Republicans introduced an effort to question the secretary of state — although it isn’t anticipated to achieve traction, and should not even get a listening to, within the Democratic-supermajority chamber.

Then, on March 14, the Colorado Republican Occasion filed a criticism with the Colorado Workplace of Lawyer Regulation Counsel, asking it to research Griswold for repeatedly calling Trump an insurrectionist when the previous president had neither been charged nor convicted of such an offense.

“She has repeatedly lied to and misled the general public,” the complainants mentioned in an e-mail issued by the state GOP.

Griswold is unfazed by the criticism.

Two Colorado courts — a Denver district choose in November and the Colorado Supreme Court docket the next month — decided Trump had engaged in riot across the Jan. 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol, she famous.

Griswold mentioned she had obtained greater than 800 threats, together with dying threats, since a bunch of Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters filed the poll problem lawsuit in September.

“I can’t be silenced by Republicans in our legislature attempting to attain low cost political factors — and I’ll by no means be intimidated by somebody like Lauren Boebert,” she mentioned. “I can’t permit the acute proper to outline standing up for democracy as not doing one’s job — it’s what each single individual ought to be doing.”

Enabling or giving cowl to these making false claims in regards to the integrity of an election, she mentioned, is “undemocratic, un-American and unacceptable.”

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

She sees the function of a state’s high election official nowadays as being the “democracy-defender-in-chief.”

“She isn’t the primary secretary of state to discuss the injury attributable to President Trump,” Gonzalez mentioned. “I admire a secretary of state who stands as much as that and ensures that our system is secure and safe.”

Partisan roots in election oversight

The criticism of Griswold underlines the sometimes-partisan nature of election oversight, which most notably caught the general public’s consideration through the 2000 Bush v. Gore debacle. Then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, a Republican who additionally served as George W. Bush’s state marketing campaign co-chair, was accused of taking part in favorites after she licensed the state’s razor-thin outcomes for Bush over Al Gore.

Trump’s election loss 20 years later put the workplace into hyper-focus, highlighted by an early January 2021 telephone name made by the then-president to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump, who was recorded, prompt that the Republican elections chief “discover” greater than 11,000 votes to make sure a Trump victory within the state received by Democrat Joe Biden.

“The secretary of state was once a backwater — now it’s excessive profile,” mentioned Kevin Johnson, government director of the Bethesda, Maryland-based Election Reformers Community.

A giant a part of the issue rests with how election administration is run in the USA, Johnson mentioned.

“They handle a course of that’s adversarial in nature and so they should be neutral in overseeing that course of,” he mentioned of election officers. “Voters need to see neutrality within the comportment of the chief of elections.”

Colorado is one in every of 31 states the place the secretary of state is chosen in a statewide election. In one other seven states, the governor or legislature appoints the secretary. In 10 states, a board of elections, fairly than a secretary of state, oversees elections, whereas in Utah and Alaska, the lieutenant governor is the chief elections officer.

Johnson’s group has sketched out a method to scale back, if not remove, partisanship from election administration by forming a bipartisan state election board that features members with authorized and election experience.

“Our elections officers are elected in partisan elections — no different democratic nation on this planet does that,” Johnson mentioned. “The explanation no different nation does that’s it results in conflicts of curiosity.”

In a ballot carried out by the American Politics Analysis Lab on the College of Colorado Boulder, launched in January, simply 52% of Coloradans surveyed thought elections throughout the nation can be run “pretty and precisely” in 2024. The numbers improved when respondents had been requested in regards to the state’s upcoming elections — 68% felt they’d be honest and correct.

However there was a stark partisan break up, with 88% of Democrats saying Colorado’s elections can be run pretty and 63% of independents saying so. Solely 54% of Republicans felt that method.

CU political science professor Anand Edward Sokhey, who oversaw the survey, mentioned he discovered “the partisan gaps on electoral confidence regarding.” However tracing the precise causes of such disparities in sentiment is troublesome, he mentioned, if not unattainable.

Eyeing larger workplace?

Former state GOP social gathering chair Dick Wadhams, like Griswold, is not any fan of Trump. He additionally disagrees with Republican makes an attempt to recall or impeach Griswold.

However he has robust phrases for the secretary of state.

“In some ways, I believe she is as irresponsible because the stolen election conspiracy crowd on the Republican facet,” Wadhams mentioned. “She ought to be restoring belief within the course of.”

Griswold, he mentioned, is so baldly partisan that she has disrupted the lengthy, staid custom of secretaries of state in Colorado, the place the perform of the workplace largely took priority over who was main it.

Not that each one her predecessors had been quiet bureaucrats. Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler bumped into ethics issues and raised Democratic hackles throughout his tenure a decade in the past — even launching an unsuccessful 2014 bid for governor.

However in Wadhams’ view, Gessler was a “rank novice in comparison with Jena Griswold” by way of partisanship. He surmises {that a} want for larger workplace may very well be behind Griswold’s strategy.

Requested if she had future political ambitions, Griswold mentioned she was “locked in and centered on this election cycle.”