The best thing about 2024 for Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is that, as of Thursday, there are 61 days left in it.
Last year arguably began on a high note for Griswold, as she became the toast of the liberal establishment by kicking Donald Trump off her state’s ballot for being an “insurrectionist.” That flimsy pretext for election sabotage lasted until March, when the Supreme Court ruled against states unilaterally making such decisions without Congress.
By that time, it looked that Trump was pretty much unstoppable in the march to the GOP presidential nomination, anyhow, and the fact remained that Colorado wasn’t going to determine whether Trump was in office from 2025 onwards. On the other hand, Griswold might have some issues hanging onto her gig, thanks in no small part to a serious election integrity crisis.
According to CBS News, Griswold is under fire after her office leaked the BIOS passwords to its voting systems in June, leaving them online for five months until they were flagged. The BIOS passwords are one of two passwords needed to access select voting equipment.
Even after that, the office didn’t notify county clerks that there had been a security breach.
“Unfortunately, clerks found out about it from an email that came from the state GOP, which was incredibly disappointing,” said Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks’ Association.
“If a mistake happens in a county, counties have to report that out to the state immediately. And so with something like this, when it is such so severe in nature, potentially severe, we think that the first call should have been to the county, so that we could have taken a look at our systems and at our security processes and make sure that everything was OK.”
In an interview with KUSA, Griswold was grilled over the mishap and asked point-blank whether she would resign.
“This is not the first time that your office has made mistakes that have damaged voters’ confidence in our elections,” Kyle Clark said.
Do you believe Jen Griswold should resign?
“In 2022, your office sent out mailers to 30,000 non-citizens inviting them to register to vote; they, of course, are not eligible to register to vote. That same year, your office used Colorado’s ballot-tracking system to send messages to specific Coloradans encouraging them to vote when, in fact, they already had voted, causing confusion that had to be cleaned up by the county clerks. And now, this leak of the voting system passwords.
“Given your office’s repeated errors that have damaged confidence in our elections, which you say is paramount, will you resign?”
“Absolutely not,” Griswold responded, accusing Clark of “unfairly characterizing” the situation and “leaving out some crucial information.”
“Will you resign?”
BRUTAL! This interview was a disaster! pic.twitter.com/FXarvEMLF9
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) October 30, 2024
After she went on to try and minimize the damage that had occurred, Clark noted the “number of fundamental errors that have undermined voter confidence in elections.”
“Why do you think they keep happening?” he asked.
“Why do errors happen? Kyle, there are unfortunately, um, situations that arise every election that we are fixing as quickly as possible, in the counties — and, once in a while, from my office, too,” Griswold responded.
Yes, once in a while, it might involve her office, too. Smile when you say that, Kyle!
This is humiliating stuff — and, by the way, if you get the feeling she’s not being fully transparent here: Surprise, she apparently isn’t! It’s worth noting that when a pro-Trump county clerk posted passwords for the voting systems online, it was apparently quite a serious breach,
“She said the release of that one password alone was a very serious election breach,” former Colorado deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Taheri said, CBS reported. “And now, she’s trying to say the release of a mass amount of passwords — no big deal. Almost the worst part of this entire fiasco is that she hid it from the people who needed to know the most.”
Also, while the secretary of state’s office is trying to say that just one of the passwords going online isn’t a big issue, Taheri said that this isn’t true either.
“She’s trying to say that in order to get in, you need both passwords,” Taheri said. “Well, not really. The first password, as long as you’re physically there, you could then plug a USB into the computer, bypass the system password and get in and start doing whatever you wanted with the software.”
Whoops. Well, look — mistakes happen! So did Jena Griswold’s time in office. One hopes both errors can be fixed.
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