The Colorado County Clerks Association said it is fighting back against “dishonest actors, grifters, and bullies” — people and entities that, the group said, undermine voter confidence in Colorado’s election system.
On Friday, the association’s Republican-dominated executive board sent a letter to every election official across the state, urging them to help county clerks “correct the record and regain trust taken from our elections by bullies and bad actors through a concerted national and statewide effort to deceive, not through any problems with our actual voting systems.”
The association’s 10-member executive board is made up of nine Republicans and one Democrat.
In the letter, the clerks made a rhetorical point: If the 2023 election was full of “vulnerabilities” and questions about procedures, as claimed by some, how did Proposition HH, which Democratic legislators and Gov. Jared Polis endorsed, end up losing by 18 percentage points?
Republican representatives to canvas boards in five Colorado counties — Boulder, Jefferson, El Paso, La Plata and Larimer — refused to certify their election results, following a request from the state GOP. A state party official argued that “nothing has changed since the 2020 elections.”
“The voting equipment is the same, uncertified, Chinese-built electronics with built-in internet capability. They are not ‘secure’ by any national security definition of the word,” the party official said, adding that “Colorado’s voter rolls remain a playground for election-manipulators.”
In these counties, Republicans are in the minority, and the election results were ultimately certified.
“Some of the same folks who delighted at Prop HH’S demise and believe that outcome was accurate still believe that President Trump won the 2020 presidential election, although all evidence and testimony from Trump’s own legal team completely reject the claim that the election was stolen,” the county clerks said.
In their letter, the clerks also noted guilty pleas — to lesser charges as a part of a deal struck with prosecutors — from Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, formerly a deputy district attorney in Weld County. They had faced charges of conspiring to overturn Trump’s loss in Georgia in 2020.
Undermining a legal election is not an American ideal, the clerks said such claims are also leading to threats against election workers.
As the 2024 election season begins, the clerks said Colorado’s elections are run by professionals, who have been preparing year-round to maintain election security, accuracy and accessibility; that elections are conducted by multi-partisan poll workers, who are well-trained to verify voter eligibility, review signatures and tabulate results; and, the state’s elections are transparent, with “meaningful” citizen participation and observation.
“Now is the time for courage, not cowardice,” the clerks wrote. “It’s time to put the mission of governing and upholding the Constitution over political ambition.”
On the social media platform X, the state Republican Party, which responded to a tweet from 9News’ Kyle Clark, who called the letter blistering, posted, “We’d have to care about what they said for it to be ‘ blistering.’”
The clerks’ association is led by Matt Crane, formerly the Republican clerk and recorder for Arapahoe County, while its executive board president is Justin Grantham, a Republican clerk and recorder in Fremont County.