June 18, 2021 02:00 PM UTC

SoS Griswold Shuts Down AZ-Style Ballot Goose Chase

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• by: Colorado Pols

A press release yesterday afternoon from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold announces new emergency rules to prevent unqualified, unsupervised partisan hacks from gaining custody of Colorado’s voting equipment and ballots records to engage in the shenanigans presently underway in the state of Arizona:

“Colorado’s elections are considered the safest in the nation, and we must remain steadfast in our dedication to security,” said Secretary of State Jena Griswold. “Along those lines, no third-party person or vendor will be permitted access to voting equipment in our state. We will not risk the state’s election security nor perpetuate The Big Lie. Sham audits have no place in Colorado.”

The new and amended rules, which have been implemented immediately, reinforce who can access state-certified voting systems. In order to access any component of a county’s voting system, a person must have passed a comprehensive criminal background check and be either an employee of the county clerk, an employee of the voting system provider, an employee of the Secretary of State’s Office, or an appointed election judge.

The rules further enable the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office to limit or prohibit the use of, as well as decertify, any voting systems component in the event of a break in its chain-of-custody or other hardware security compromises, such that its security and integrity can no longer be verified.

A third-party vendor with no election experience is currently performing a faulty, unsecure election audit in Arizona and calls for such sham audits have been spreading in other states. Several Colorado counties have been contacted by third parties offering to conduct audits. Colorado already administers post-election Risk Limiting Audits after every statewide election, which gives a statistical level of confidence that the outcome of an election is correct.

Last week after the Colorado General Assembly adjourned for the year, highly imaginative election denier GOP Rep. Ron Hanks reportedly drove straight to Phoenix to observe the so-called “audit” taking place there, after the GOP-controlled Arizona Senate seized the ballots and counting hardware from the 2020 election and handed them to a shady outfit calling itself Cyber Ninjas for what they’re calling an audit but in fact has none of the procedures and safeguards against abuse that the official recounts that already took place did. It was reported that a number of ballots from the Arizona audit have been transported to rural Montana for unknown purposes, and at this point the chain of custody over these ballots has been broken, run over, and peed on to the point they can never be trusted. None of which really matters since the 2020 election is over, and ballots have been officially counted, recounted, and certified all they need to be.

The Colorado Secretary of State has just moved to ban any possible election audit in the state of Colorado.

Democrats are consistently terrified of election integrity!

— Lauren Boebert (@laurenboebert) June 18, 2021

In truth, by keeping Colorado’s election systems and ballots out of the hands of partisan prevaricators with shady methods and confirmation bias, Griswold is the one upholding election integrity. It’s not even close. And if you don’t want to believe a Democratic Secretary of State, in Colorado it was Republican county clerks who took point last November and December in refuting the misinformation about Colorado’s elections systems–which just happened to also refute the Big Lie that the election was rigged in the swing states that decided the presidential race, since Colorado uses Dominion Voting Systems hardware and mail ballots sent “unsolicited” to all active voters.

Griswold, like the GOP clerks in Colorado and Secretaries of State across the country in both parties, is fighting a running battle against a determined campaign of misinformation that, as long as Donald Trump and the enablers of his political afterlife refuse to put a stop to it, will probably never be fully extinguished. It’s therefore even more important for the majority of Americans who believe the 2020 election was not stolen to remain as energetic in their defense of our democratic process as Trump dead-enders are in their assault on it.

Don’t even crack the door for these people.