Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold is making national headlines after her office inadvertently posted a spreadsheet to its website with a hidden tab with passwords to access voting machines.
Griswold, a Democrat, told Colorado Public Radio on Wednesday the passwords were accidentally published by a member of her staff that no longer works for the state.
She also said only half of the passwords needed to access sensitive election machine systems were published and that she doesn’t view the event as a security threat to her state’s election. An outside group will perform a personnel investigation of what happened after the election.
Even so, Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray told Cowboy State Daily the password release is more serious than Griswold has made it out to be, and that he’s not surprised it happened.
“Jena Griswold's leftwing radicalism has been revealed time and time again,” Gray said.
Griswold supported a lawsuit last winter to remove former President Donald Trump’s name from Colorado election ballots because of his alleged role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Gray opposed that move and filed two different amicus briefs on the matter.
Both he and Griswold spoke in front of the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 8 when the high court considered oral arguments in the case.
What Happened
On Tuesday morning, Colorado Republican Party Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman shared the hidden tab discovery in a mass email, according to 9NEWS.
Griswold revealed to Colorado Public Radio that her staff had known about the passwords being made public since last week yet hadn’t let the public or the state’s county clerks know until the GOP email about it.
As a result of the breach, Colorado House Republicans put out a call for Griswold to resign, but she’s refusing to do so.
“No, I'm not going to resign,” Griswold told Denver7 News. “A civil servant in the department made a serious mistake that we have actively taken action to remedy. Humans make mistakes. And that's why I've been so focused on adding more layers of security to our elections.”
The passwords were located within a hidden tab of a spreadsheet that anyone could download from the Colorado Secretary of State's website.
According to Denver7 News, the information had been on the website for months before being taken down Oct. 24.
Griswold’s error has also caught the attention of former President Donald Trump.
A Colorado law firm representing Trump’s campaign sent a letter Wednesday demanding she disclose more information about counties that were affected by the breach, halt processing mail-in ballots until new accuracy tests are completed and prepare to rescan all ballots, according to 9NEWS.
Wyoming Perspective
Former Wyoming Secretary of State Max Maxfield said any kind of breach to election equipment should be taken seriously.
“Any sort of infraction or any sort of interference with voting has to be taken very seriously,” he told Cowboy State Daily.
But Maxfield also added he doesn’t believe the breach in Colorado justifies Griswold’s resignation.
Maxfield added that he feels very confident about the security of Wyoming’s elections.
There have been very few cases of voter fraud prosecuted in Wyoming over the last 25 years and the August primary election resulted in no serious voting machines issues.
Still, that hasn’t stopped the recent creation of a ballot initiative campaign to do all elections by hand count in Wyoming out of concern for potential fraud caused by the use of electronic voting machines.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
