January 08, 2025 12:15 PM UTC

Legislature Convenes with New Idiocy from House Republicans

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• by: Colorado Pols

The 2025 Colorado legislative session kicked off today with many of the same dumb problems from previous sessions, thanks in part to the “Unambiguously Lame Duo” of Colorado Springs Republican Reps. Ken “Dildo” DeGraff and Scott “There is No” Bottoms.

As The Denver Post explains:

After the early pomp and circumstance, plus a land acknowledgement from a Ute Mountain Ute tribal leader, the House began the session with two Republican lawmakers — Reps. Scott Bottoms and Ken DeGraaf — essentially challenging the results of the 2024 election. They both argued, without evidence, that the inadvertent posting of some election passwords by the Secretary of State’s Office undermined the results. [Pols emphasis]

Two investigations — one by a law firm and another by the Denver District Attorney’s Office — both determined the posting of the passwords was a mistake and found no criminal or election integrity concerns. A lawsuit against the Secretary of State’s Office by the Libertarian Party of Colorado was also rejected, with a judge determining that there was no evidence of an election breach or an intentional posting of the passwords.

The passwords were not, on their own, sufficient to change any votes, despite claims by Bottoms. A second set of passwords, plus physical access to secure elections equipment in individual clerks’ offices, would’ve also been required to alter the systems. There is no evidence that any equipment was improperly accessed or that any results were altered.

The chamber overwhelmingly voted to reject the challenge, but six of the House’s 22 Republicans voted against accepting the results of the election in which they participated and won. Bottoms and DeGraaf were joined by Reps. Stephanie Luck, Ron Weinberg and Brandi Bradley and Rep.-elect Larry Suckla in voting no. [Pols emphasis]

House Republicans spent a lot of time crowing after the November 2024 election about capturing three new seats in the state legislature…only to open the new session by basically challenging their own election results. As the Post continues:

House Democratic officials said that as far as they knew, this was the first time lawmakers have made a motion opposing certification of election results. The same certification vote sailed through in the Senate a few minutes ago. Had the House vote failed, the legislature would not have been able to convene. [Pols emphasis]

We noted in December that it’s always weird when election deniers somehow win elections, and this is another example of that strangeness. If Bottoms, DeGraaf, and fellow rocket surgeons Stephanie Luck, Ron Weinberg, Brandi Bradley and Larry Suckla had their way, they couldn’t even be officially sworn-in to serve their new terms. What were they possibly hoping to achieve?

This silliness is all about an election password drama that took place before the November election but was eventually proven to be more of a narrative problem than an actual concern related to voting. Even Bottoms himself took to the House Floor to make clear that he wasn’t even sure there was an actual issue — though he was happy to make a big deal out of it anyway:

BOTTOMS: This is pretty simple I’ll just use one example. This – I don’t think anybody in this room and I’m not assuming anybody in this room was not duly elected, ‘cuz I have no proof of that. So assuming everybody here was duly elected, we still know the system is very broken and the laws were broken. [Pols emphasis]

When the passwords were released, they were released to every county except one. I don’t have no proof that any of those passwords were used to do anything, nobody else has proof of that. But I think it would be naive to assume that at least one person did not change at least one vote. And that means that laws were broken and there should be legal criminal investigations into the Secretary of State’s office about this whole thing and therefore I am very uncomfortable certifying this election.

Bottoms and five other House Republicans refused to certify the results of the 2024 election — again, which saw them actually gain three seats — based on an admittedly-unproven belief that something shady happened somewhere for some reason.

And this is just Day One.