May 03, 2022 11:43 AM UTC

Where Do These Rogue Clerks Get Off, Anyway?

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• by: Colorado Pols

Denver7’s Blair Miller reports on court action last week in the case between Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder. Schroeder, as readers will recall, has admitted to making unauthorized copies of election system computer hard drives in a similar effort to Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is currently facing felony charges after election system data was copied and leaked to conspiracy theorists seeking (unsuccessfully) for evidence the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.

The difference in Elbert County Clerk Schroeder’s case, and most likely why he’s not (for now) facing prison time like Clerk Peters, is that Schroeder doesn’t appear to have distributed the data to anyone except an outside attorney for “safekeeping.” The problem of course is that Clerk Schroeder has no right to do any of this–and certainly no right to refuse a request by the Secretary of State to return this proprietary data.

As always seems to be the case, it takes a judge to cut through the nonsense:

An Elbert County District Court judge on Friday ordered Elbert County Clerk and Recorder Dallas Schroeder to turn over all copies of election hard drive images he made by 5 p.m. Wednesday and overruled objections his attorneys made in court last week about why he should not be required to…

In Friday’s order, Judge Kramer wrote that the two election orders Griswold issued were within her statutory rights as secretary of state and that Schroeder must comply with both.

“The fact that the Clerk and Recorder does not trust the Secretary of State to perform her official duties does not excuse his duty to comply with her orders,” Judge Kramer wrote… [Pols emphasis]

And if pointing out that obvious fact wasn’t enough, the judge gave Clerk Schroeder a refresher course in what being in authority over another person, you know, means:

“Because the Colorado Election Code places the Secretary of State in a position superior to the county Clerk and Recorder, Griswold’s right to the information she seeks is superior to Schroeder’s right to withhold the information from her,” Kramer wrote in the order.

Setting aside Trump’s discredited conspiracy theories as judges and other reasonable people do from the outset, the whole thing is pretty simple: the Secretary of State is the boss of the county clerks. County clerks are therefore required to follow the orders of the Secretary of State. This is a conversation we would expect to have with a millennial kid with no work experience who imagines they know better than their boss.

It’s refreshing to see the judge shut this silliness down…well, like a boss.

And with that, the streak of the “Big Lie” getting laughed out of court continues unbroken.