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October 30, 2024 12:03 PM UTC

Jena Griswold Has a Big (2026) Election Problem

  • 26 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols
Kyle Clark and Jena Griswold

One week before Election Day, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold started fielding the wrong kind of calls. By the end of the evening on Tuesday, one election cycle — but not this one — had changed significantly.

It has long been an open secret that the ambitious Griswold — who tested the waters for a U.S. Senate bid in 2019 — has higher political aspirations. For at least a year now, Griswold has been positioning herself for a gubernatorial run in 2026. It may be that her constant focus on her future allowed her to lose track of the present, which is where a big mistake happened. Griswold’s response to this problem constitute both a narrative failure and a confidence failure in her leadership.

First, here’s the story on the current problem from the SOS office. As Marshall Zelinger reports for 9News:

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office inadvertently posted a spreadsheet to its website with a hidden tab that included voting system passwords.

In a statement to 9NEWS, a spokesperson for the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office said that “the Department is working to remedy this situation where necessary.”

“The Department took immediate action as soon as it was aware of this and informed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which closely monitors and protects the county’s essential security infrastructure,” the spokesperson said.

News of the problem first came from a mass email sent by the Colorado Republican Party. While the State GOP certainly has a motive to push questions about the legitimacy of the election on behalf of Overlord Trump, it does not appear that this mistake — egregious as it may be — puts the 2024 election in any sort of danger in Colorado or elsewhere. Voting systems can only be accessed via secure rooms by someone with badge access under 24/7 surveillance, and the passwords that were apparently available online for several months are just one of two that are needed in order to access election machines.

Back to 9News:

Matt Crane, a former Republican Arapahoe County Clerk and current executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association, said the fact that the passwords were online, albeit hidden, is concerning, but that the group is satisfied with the actions the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office is taking.

“The truth is, is this a concern? Yes,” Crane said. “Is it being mitigated? Yes. Does this mean that all of the computers are connected to the internet and that votes are being flipped? No.”

Crane said that because every voter votes on a paper ballot – yes, mail-in ballots are still paper ballots – any discrepancies can be audited and remedied.

“I want to stress here, this isn’t our Republicans, but you will have some Republicans who will use this for political and financial purposes. Whereas we as clerks, we will stay in the truth in honoring our oath of office to serve our constituents in a truthful and honest manner,” Crane said.

Again, it does not appear that there is any cause for concern that the 2024 election could be open to shenanigans because of this password leak. Among other reactions, Griswold told 9News that her office immediately dispatched staffers into the field to assess election systems and change any passwords where necessary. In addition, there is a risk-limiting audit that takes place after every election in which a select number of ballots are pulled for a specific race in each county and compared to the machine count. As Zelinger notes for 9News, “Colorado started doing risk-limiting audits in 2017, and in every case, it has verified the machine count to the paper ballots.”

Unfortunately for Griswold, this is not the end of the story. In discussing the issue with Kyle Clark of 9News, something else happened: Griswold’s hopes at becoming Colorado’s next Governor went up in smoke. In a 15-minute interview, Griswold was evasive and unnecessarily defensive. For someone who is experienced with media interviews and has jumped at any chance to be on television in recent years, Griswold appeared to be caught off guard by some pretty obvious questions.

Let’s break down how this went so wrong for Griswold, starting with Clark’s question about how long certain passwords were available to the public online:

 

CLARK: Is it accurate that the passwords were removed from the public portion of your website last Thursday?

GRISWOLD: Yes.

CLARK: How long were they up?

GRISWOLD: [Takes deep breath] They were up for several months without it being realized. As soon as my office’s civil servants became aware that they were up, we started to take action.

Of course, it was the Colorado Republican Party who made the public (and the media) aware of this issue, which leads to Clark’s next question and begins the full unraveling for Griswold. Not only did Griswold not inform the county clerks of the issue…it’s not clear that she was even planning to tell them.

 

 

CLARK: Is it accurate that you did not notify the county clerks of  this breach, and they found out when the Colorado Republican Party announced it today?

GRISWOLD: What is accurate is that we had began an investigation and were working with the appropriate federal partners.

Griswold did not answer that question, so Clark tries again:

CLARK: Had you announced it to the county clerks?

GRISWOLD: No, we had not. We were doing an investigation and [were] in the field today, actually, before it was announced by the Republican Party.

Clark continues asking simple and relevant questions. Griswold continues responding in a curious manner:

 

 

CLARK: You held a press conference last Thursday to discuss an unrelated voter fraud scheme in Mesa County. Were you aware at that time that your office had leaked the passwords?

GRISWOLD: Well, to be very clear, when you say, ‘Passwords,’ there are two sets of passwords held by two separate parties in different locations to access voting equipment. So we do not think that this poses an immediate security threat to Colorado’s elections.

And at the time of the press conference we were not aware…[pause]…I was not aware. [Pols emphasis]

The conversation eventually returns back to whether or not Griswold was planning to inform Colorado county clerks about the password leak. Her final answer is not inspiring:

GRISWOLD: We did not decide not to disclose something to county clerks.

Gah!

We probably weren’t not going to not disclose this problem!

 

Clark later asks Griswold about how an investigation into this leak is going to progress. Griswold dodges a direct answer, leading to this exchange:

CLARK: So, I just want to make sure that I have a clear answer to that question. It sounds like what you’re saying is that the only people investigating the actions of your office are your office…

GRISWOLD: Well, what happened in my office is very straightforward. We unfortunately had a civil servant upload a spreadsheet with some passwords to voting equipment…

Oy.

Griswold certainly seems to indicate that she hasn’t even contemplated an outside investigation into how this problem might have occurred.

Finally, here are the whoppers:

CLARK: This is not the first time that your office has made mistakes that have damaged voters’ confidence in our elections…

Clark goes through a list of errors dating to the 2022 election before finishing with this:

CLARK: Given your office’s repeated errors that have damaged confidence in our elections, which you say is paramount, will you resign?

GRISWOLD: Absolutely not, Kyle, and I just want to…you’re unfairly characterizing and leaving out some, um, crucial information…

The rest of Griswold’s answer is pretty bad, but it gets worse on the follow-up:

CLARK: Given the number of fundamental errors that your office has made that have undermined voter confidence in elections, why do you think they keep happening?

GRISWOLD: [Takes a deep breath and pauses for several seconds] Why do errors happen? Kyle, there are, unfortunately, situations that arise every election that we are fixing as quickly as possible in the counties, and once in awhile, in my office, too.

Yikes.

We’re not going to go down a MAGA road of conspiracy nonsense here, because that’s not what happened and the 2024 election appears to be secure. But more than one thing can be true at the same time. In this case, the Secretary of State’s office made a big mistake and SOS Jena Griswold made everything look a lot worse in the subsequent interview trying to explain it away. She made it clear that her office was not planning to inform county clerks about the mistake, and even dodged a later question about whether she had planned to reveal the error to the public. The fact that the Colorado Republican Party put this out into the world before Griswold’s office could take accountability is a terrible look for all involved.

If this leak turns out to be a bigger mistake than it appears at the moment, then this story will obviously get much worse for Griswold. But in terms of her future as a candidate for Governor in 2026, the damage has already been done. Regaining the confidence of voters as soon as June 2026 may not be possible for Griswold.

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26 thoughts on “Jena Griswold Has a Big (2026) Election Problem”

  1. What gets me in these cases is that the politican would be best served by doing the right thing – admitting it's a mistake and immediately telling all the appropiate individuals and the press. And then figuring out what went wrong and announcing the results of that investigsation.

    I agree that her attempt to obfuscate and minimize here has probably torched any future political office for her.

  2. Great. Just fucking great. It looks like Colorado might not be immune from the wingnut election contest litigation tsunami that will cover the country through Inauguration Day and beyond in the event of anything resembling a Harris Electoral College win materializes.

  4. From 9News:

    Some passwords are still active and not all have been changed.

    This is beyond incompetent. Can Governor Polis step in and appoint someone capable of doing the job? This is fundamental to continuing as a democracy.

     

    3. Somewhere it was mentioned that these were BIOS passwords.  If you’re reasonably tech savvy, you’ll understand what that means.  The BIOS or UEFI in simple terms is a low level system that a computer boots to which performs some self tests and then decides how the computer boots.  A BIOS password can be used to prevent changes/access to settings in the BIOS.  It can also set a password required to boot a device.  Often there’s a separate supervisor password that can be required to change the regular BIOS password.  On voting equipment / computers, changing the BIOS password would be a slow and laborious process requiring sending teams of people in person (as I hope things like Intel AMT aren’t present on any of the devices). As an aside, many computers have secret backdoor bios passwords

      Griswald didn’t do a great job of explaining the technical side of things and other security measures that are in place.  She’s trying to walk the line between not commenting on an active investigation and assuring the public and not doing a great job of it.  Ideally they’d change the BIOS passwords on all affected devices, but I doubt they have the manpower to do so in a timely manner and there are other security measures.

      It’s worth remembering that in Colorado we use paper ballots.  Even for people with disabilities who vote on a machine the output is a marked paper ballot, so there’s always something we can go back and recount.  If you want to worry about the integrity of voting machines, direct your focus to red states without much of an audit trail.  Right wing media demonized dominion and Smartmatic, but some implementations of Diebold and ES&S and other voting systems in red states are what actually scare me.

      1. A Person make some good technical points.  I am in the computer industry and our company has the standard level of corporate paranoia about corporate espionage, and though it tries to support remote technical support of machines, a person must come to my machine to physically enter a BIOS password. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet the security configuration for voting machines would not be more open than what is at my place of work.  I understand a former country clerk is doing some “hard time” for letting people into secure facilities where voting machines are located, so it’s reasonable to think the physical access security is better than average.

        I think Griswold has made an unfortunate unforced error.  But as has been well pointed out, the paper trail can be used to alleviate any concerns of a close contest, such as I suspect will be the case in CD-8.  I don’t think this error will end her ambitions, though it might set them back.  She might have to reflect, wait a bit, improve her game, not make any mistakes for a while before climbing the next rung.  Why I remember a Delaware Senator named Joe Biden had to drop out of the presidential race when caught plagiarising U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock pretty much “red-handed”.  Many pronounced the doom that Senator was as far as Joe would ever get. But America is the land of redemption, and the people have short memories.

      2. The passwords are one element of a multi-factor security program.

        As I understand it, the Secretary of State's team has one set of passwords.  Equipment suppliers have a second set of passwords and their software.  The County Clerks control the equipment.  A trusted build requires people from all 3 different organizations to cooperate to modify the system, and the process is conducted with controlled access and video surveillance.  Once installed, there is a strict chain of custody requirement, with tamper-proof seals on the equipment, video surveillance of the physical sites, and every move is conducted by two or more individuals with multiple partisan affiliations.

        The people hollering about the passwords were, so far as I can tell, silent (or supportive) about Tina Peters's activity.

  5. Griswold has been a good secretary of state, but she was never going to be governor.

    Why? 

    Because Weiser wants that job, probably, and, if he doesn't, so do several state legislators.

    I'd rather see Griswold in the job than Weiser. She seems to have principles and to actually care about people, while Weiser is so nakedly ambitious and terrified of offending anyone by doing anything to challenge the oil industry that he strikes me as just a particularly awful prospective governor.

    Whoever gets the job next time, I hope they care more about air pollution and climate change than does Jared Polis. That guy is a gigantic disappointment as a governor. I am hard-pressed to think of one thing that he has done that has made any meaningful improvement in the lives of Colorado residents.

    No, I"m not a Republican. Yes, I voted for Polis twice, but only because his opponents were so, so much worse.

    1. Griswold is a rank amateur compared to Weiser, who has done a lot for Colorado.  His litigation against the Kroger/Albertsons merger is excellent.
      Plus, he is an antitrust expert. Both smarter and more accomplished than Griswold. I’ll happily vote for Phil.

  6. Griswold has been a great secretary of state. Given that, This was a bad error, even though no election equipment was compromised at all apparently, as a result of the password leak.

    It's reasonable that she had not informed the county clerks until her office , with the Feds, investigated and determined that there was, in fact,  no breach of security. I would want my boss to do that before pressing the panic button. but in the political environment that we live in it was ripe for political exploitation, and that's what's happening. 

     This was about Kyle Clark's proving that he is not partisan when I'm sure he's getting a lot of pressure and probably even threats because of his interviews with Republican officials.

    3. "Kyle Clark…..I'm sure he's getting a lot of pressure and probably even threats…."

      Pure conjecture and rumor unless you have something more solid to offer.

      1. There are many threats and insults on Kyle Clark's X feed. He replies to most of them. Here's a couple of examples:

        https://x.com/KyleClark/status/1852048648642892221

        https://x.com/KyleClark/status/1850972807384948988

        Also check the comments on his youtube channel.

        Gtiswold also gets death threats, rape threats, threats to her family including her new baby, and has had to hire security people.

        This is Trump’s MAGA party ‘s new normal.

         

  8. I like her but the way she's handled this very avoidable self-own makes me hope she doesn't enter the race for governor in 2026. We need a strong democrat to keep CO under Dem leadership and sadly she isn't it. We can't afford to elect a Republican to governor, but the way our GOP is, they'll probably run somebody worse than horse-face Ghanal.

    1. I'm not going to name names, but there are a couple Republicans who might concern me a bit if they decided to run. Ganahl's campaign was SO bad, and indeed they've had a string of problematic candidates since Bill Owens left office. But I think the only way they'd be running against mega-buxxx like what Polis can find in his couch cushions would be if a certain K.T. decided to take a stab at it.

  9. Is it really this slow of a news day?  This hit piece is remarkably weak and will have zero effect on future races.  Silverii and Pettersen must be trying to position her to run for Guv now that Hick says he will run for senate again.

  10. Griswold was the first Democrat to win a Colorado Secretary of State election in sixty years, and she even managed to get reelected. That’s impressive, but damn, this is just the latest in a string of SoS Office clownery on her watch. If in fact she wants another political office after her SoS term ends, that just got a lot more difficult.

  11. Hick really needs to step down and raise his new kid

    Neguse may run for gov unless Dems win House and he has a psth to speaker. if he runs for gov, I bet Griswold seeks to replace him 
     

    I’m sure Pettersen – with a young one and another on the way- would prefer a shorter commute and she’s be good governor 

    Crow deserves a promotion to Senate 

    I don’t know the case for Weiser to be gov. 

    1. I will second your call for a day when the appellation, " Frackenlooper", will not be associated with Colorado government. His betrayal of the coalition that got signicant O&G legislation passed in 2009 branded him for life. Time to retire ,John, and ride off into the sunset.

      Giddy-up.

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