December 06, 2024 12:09 PM UTC

Who Really Broke The Law In Election Machine Password Case?

• 2 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Colorado Democratic Party chairman Shad Murib agrees that Rep. Stephanie Luck’s role in this incident raises questions:

So eager to stick it to the Secretary of State that Rep. Luck broke the law herself? It’s looking more like the Tina Peters case all the time.

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We wrote last Monday about a luncheon event hosted by the Colorado Republican Party featuring some of the state’s most notorious election deniers, at least two of which have called for politicians they consider “treasonous” to be hung–most recently by Shawn Smith of the so-called U.S. Election Integrity Plan at this luncheon, suggesting that Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold should be executed (after a trial, naturally!) over the accidental leak of voting machine BIOS passwords that caused a flurry of misinformed panic in the final days before the November elections.

An investigation by the SoS office quickly determined that the passwords were not in themselves a major security risk, since the machines are protected behind additional layers of physical security that would need to be bypassed in order to access them. A more thorough outside investigation was ordered, and the Denver DA’s office also announced their own investigation. Both of these are expected to confirm the basic facts, that despite an undeniable lapse in best practices by the SoS office no actual harm was done, and no voting machines were tampered with as a result of the leak. Colorado law passed after the Tina Peters debacle is clear that the only crime is in knowingly disclosing these passwords, and no one has seriously alleged that the SoS office’s error was a deliberate act. There have been many unserious allegations to that end, of course, and those are the ones that generally end in calls for politicians to be hung.

Another problem with Shawn Smith calling for people to hang over this password leak is that he is personally the source of said leak, which he claims he only discovered right before the election despite having originally downloaded the file containing them over the summer. Speaking at last week’s event, Smith provided some additional details about how he supposedly discovered the passwords–but his explanation raises more questions than it answers:

Smith…addressed the whistleblowing, revealing that he did not discover the passwords on his own. Smith said he was tipped off by state Representative Stephanie Luck and failed House District 38 candidate Jeff Patty, who knew that Smith regularly downloads the office’s spreadsheets and were informed by an unidentified party that there were hidden passwords in one of the files. [Pols emphasis]

Because of the password leak, Smith argued that the results of Colorado’s 2024 primary and general elections cannot be trusted. A judge ruled on Election Day that there was no evidence that voting system components were compromised due to the leak. The Denver District Attorney’s Office is now investigating whether the incident violated state law regarding accessing and tampering with voting equipment.

So the first question is for Rep. Stephanie Luck, and it’s the same question we had for Tina Peters: when presented with evidence of a problem, why didn’t she report it immediately to election officials instead of going to a known election denier? And that leads to the more important question: if Rep. Luck is the one who disclosed the existence of these passwords to Shawn Smith, did Rep. Luck break Colorado’s law against knowingly leaking election system passwords? Here’s the letter of the law:

Any person who knowingly publishes or causes to be published passwords or other confidential information relating to a voting system shall immediately have their authorized access revoked and is guilty of a class 5 felony.
C.R.S. § 1-13-708

SoS Griswold’s office did not knowingly publish these passwords. But it looks to us like Rep. Stephanie Luck may have done exactly that–and just like Tina Peters’ misbegotten attempt to prove the 2020 election was stolen by hacking election machines, Rep. Luck’s role in these passwords becoming public could be the only actual crime committed here. Again, if Rep. Luck wanted to blow the whistle on a legitimate security problem, just like with Tina Peters there is a process for that involving officials who are actually qualified to investigate. The proper procedure is not to bring in a conspiracy theorist in an attempt to sow doubt in the elections just days before the vote. We’re being asked to take Shawn Smith at his word that he didn’t know about the passwords until the last week of October, but it’s completely unknown when Rep. Luck learned about it herself.

If we were Rep. Luck, we’d let a lawyer answer all further questions. And if we were Shawn Smith, we’d strongly consider shutting the hell up.