By Kevin Lundberg | Guest Columnist, Rocky Mountain Voice
When Tina Peters was accused of sharing Mesa County election equipment password,s all of the machines were replaced and she got several years in prison.
But, when the shoe is on the other foot and Secretary of State Griswold (SOS) is caught publicly exposing more than 600 complete BIOS passwords of election machines from all across Colorado and kept it a secret for several days right before the election, it becomes an honest mistake and no big deal.
I say either pardon Tina or arrest Jena. Or, better yet, do both, for Jena is clearly guilty of withholding the facts from the public and Tina was just trying to get to the truth, so everyone could know those facts.
But the fate of Jena Griswold is not the biggest issue. The real question is: were the votes of Colorado citizens accurately counted? Did the compromised voting machines compromise our votes in 2024? Double check the machines with a hand count of the ballots, at least in the races with the most questionable outcomes.
Griswoldgate became public just days before election day. To their great credit, the Libertarian Party took the issue to court and despite the fact that this was way more serious than anything Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was accused of in 2021, the judge ignored the all-too-obvious facts and declared the machines to be fine. This was not a surprise, I have learned to expect Colorado judges to be more political than legal in their decisions and this case was no different.
However, those pesky facts still remain. Complete BIOS passwords were on the public SOS website for months and, with Griswold hiding this critical information from even the county election officials, it threw a dark cloud of uncertainty over these seriously compromised machines just days before the 2024 general election.
Despite Griswold’s attempts to first hide and then downplay this serious security breach, there is a path for her to help restore the public’s confidence in Colorado’s election equipment. She needs to conduct robust audits of the most questionable election races, or, better yet, hand count those races in full public view. She insists that Colorado is the “gold standard” of U.S. elections. Let her prove it with clear and unambiguous public reviews of the most questionable races in the 2024 election. Anything less than this full transparent review tells a very different tale, which is the obvious truth unless she steps up and proves the machines are accurate.
Griswold claims that their “Risk Limiting Audit” (RLA) of election returns verifies the accuracy of the machines. But a closer look shows the RLA to be no more than a thin facade of a test. The RLA takes a tiny sampling of one race in each county and the ballots tested are individually selected through the software of the election system that is supposedly being tested!
Larimer County, where I live, is a good example of how the RLA is not enough. An actual, public hand count would give the voting public significant evidence for the accuracy (or not) of the election machines.
As background, in Larimer County, all of the Republican candidates for the county commission lost by remarkably similar, large margins for all of the races in 2020, 2022 and 2024 and all of the Republican commissioner candidates had very different campaigns. Prior to the 2020 election the Larimer County Commission was firmly in Republican control. Now there are no Republicans on the commission. Such a dramatic shift in voting patterns has a lot of us wondering if the system might be bending the results.
In stark contrast, in 2024 there was another county government race, for the recently appointed (Republican) clerk and recorder. She won with an overwhelming majority over her Democrat opponent. It seems more than curious that Larimer County voters have gone hard left for commissioners, but the exact opposite for the clerk and recorder race.
It’s time for a serious look at the equipment counting our votes in Colorado. The secretary of state insists Colorado’s election system is the “gold standard.”
It’s time to prove it.
Editor’s note: Opinions expressed in commentary pieces are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management of the Rocky Mountain Voice, but even so we support the constitutional right of the author to express those opinions.