December 02, 2024 01:42 PM UTC

It's Always Weird When Election Deniers Win The Election

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: In a rambling email blast Saturday, Colorado GOP “Ballot and Election Security Chairman” “Raging” Ron Hanks lays the whole wacky theory out:

Colorado’s election system was more mismanaged and corrupted in 2024 than ever, and the popular vote trends we saw in every other state strangely did not register in Colorado.

We know, of course, much of our electronic election equipment was made in communist China by foreign workers, who installed wireless network systems on them – as ordered by the bureaucrats mismanaging our elections. Those brainless decisions warrant our disdain and a deep investigation immediately upon President Trump’s inauguration.

Yes, much of our election equipment was built by our most aggressive foreign adversary, who steals our technology and threatens to impose communist Chinese control over oceans and continents.

And yes, our election equipment is running secret, proprietary software with Venezuelan, Serbian, and Iranian influence. [Pols emphasis] It is very likely each or all these entities have a covert BACK DOOR access into our elections.

And our bumbling Secretary of State Griswold left complete BIOS passwords on the internet for months, giving any and all the access keys to the FRONT DOOR of our election systems. Her motives and incompetence also warrant a thorough federal investigation…

The best defense for Secretary of State Jena Griswold at this point is to simply let Ron Hanks keep talking.

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Westword’s Hannah Metzger reported last week from the Colorado Republican Party’s Capitol Club luncheon, where the state party still firmly under the control of controversial chairman Dave “Buh Bye Brandon” Williams and his gaggle of far-right operatives and election conspiracy theorists hosted such figures as Joe “America’s Hangman” Oltmann and Shawn Smith, who tried to throw the ballot count in Colorado into chaos with his last-minute disclosure of voting machine passwords inadvertently posted online by the Secretary of State’s office.

What followed was an odd amalgamation of election denial and celebration of the modest gains made this year by Republican candidates, with seemingly no thought given to how the former throws the latter into question:

The state GOP held its bimonthly luncheon with a panel of election deniers as the special guests: Shawn Smith, Mark Cook and Joe Oltmann. What began as an event discussing the election results and Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s errors in handling the state’s voting system password leak ended with the promotion of unsubstantiated conspiracies about decades of alleged fraud deniers say invalidates every election in recent memory… [Pols emphasis]

Smith is also the whistleblower who found the leaked voting system passwords posted on the Colorado Secretary of State website on a hidden tab of a public spreadsheet. However, he’s perhaps better known for participating in the January 6 insurrection or calling for Griswold to be hung in 2022 — a comment that he repeated during Tuesday’s event.

“I think anybody who has engaged in election fraud needs to hang, deserves to hang,” Smith said to scattered claps from the audience. “The media immediately said ‘He’s threatening Jena Griswold.’ I’m not threatening Jena Griswold. If you violate the law, and you violate a law like treason law, then there are punishments for that.”

Although the inadvertent leak of passwords to voting machines was an embarrassing mistake for the Secretary of State’s office, the real-world risk of voting machines being tampered with was always minimal due to the numerous additional layers of security around the machines. A law passed in the wake of the Tina Peters security breach in her failed attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was stolen makes it a crime to knowingly disclose such information, but no one has suggested this was anything other than a mistake. Shawn Smith’s calls for Jena Griswold to be hung, whether or not they meet the definitions of a legally actionable threat, are therefore the rantings of an unhinged lunatic.

Think about that as you assess how much headline-dominating panic this one fringe individual was able to sow in the final days before the 2024 elections. As for Joe Oltmann, he’s been calling for politicians he doesn’t like to hang for years–escalating his rhetoric as legal troubles stemming from his made-up stories about a former Dominion Voting Systems executive deepen.

But despite the backed-by-threats insistence from these conspiracy theorists that the results of Colorado elections can’t be trusted, in cases where Republicans won in Colorado, the party would like you to set aside your suspicions and do just that:

While Colorado voters largely resisted the red wave that hit the rest of the country during the November election — Vice President Kamala Harris won the state — GOP candidates managed to flip Congressional District 8, take three state House seats to end the Democratic supermajority and make gains on the state Board of Education and RTD board. In addition, their presidential candidate, Trump, won a decisive victory over Harris.

Darcy Schoening, director of special initiatives for the Colorado GOP, highlighted these achievements at the beginning of the event: “The liberal media is lying to you,” she proclaimed. “The Republican Party made massive gains in Colorado and will continue to do that.” [Pols emphasis]

Again, the correct word to describe the Colorado GOP’s gains in Colorado this year is modest not “massive,” but it’s undeniably true that some gains were made. The problem is that if you believe the election results in Colorado are bogus, you need to be consistent–even when Republicans win. If Democrats can freely alter the vote to fit their objectives as Smith alleges, how did Republicans win anything in Colorado this year?

No doubt he has an answer for that too. But it’s not a good one.