Gonzalez elected secretary of state, and inherits an office already in litigation

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Amanda Gonzalez was a candidate on a ballot her own office counted. On Tuesday she won the job of running elections statewide.

The Democrat, who sits as Jefferson County’s clerk and recorder, beat Republican James Wiley. The Associated Press called the race at 7:52 p.m., when Gonzalez led by 23.5 percentage points, the Colorado Sun reported.

Counting was early. The Secretary of State’s results page showed Gonzalez with 1,166,599 votes, or 60.55 percent, to Wiley’s 708,690, or 36.78 percent. Twelve of the state’s 64 counties had reported complete results.

Libertarian Sean Vadney had 26,102 votes. American Constitution Party candidate Amanda Campbell had 13,719. Forward Party candidate Celeste Landry had 11,517.

Gonzalez, 42, of Arvada, replaces Jena Griswold, who was term-limited and ran for attorney general.

Experience against restoration

At an Oct. 7 debate hosted by Colorado Politics at the Denver Press Club, Gonzalez asked whether Colorado could afford to hand the 2028 presidential election to someone who had never run one.

“Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, an unaffiliated voter, you need to make sure that every eligible voter is able to cast their ballot and have that ballot accurately counted,” she said, according to the Denver Gazette.

Wiley gave the shorter version of his own case.

“I’m not here to reform. I’m here to restore.”

What he proposed was specific. Return to in-person voting at neighborhood precincts, and make Election Day a holiday so people do not have to work. Scale back mail voting to an absentee system, where only voters who apply with a reason get a ballot by mail, per the Colorado Sun’s candidate guide.

Count the ballots by hand, starting with rural counties. He named Cheyenne and Moffat. Require voter ID at the polls.

He also talked about deleting the voter rolls and making every eligible voter register again, which Colorado Newsline reported he had called one of his first priorities.

Wiley has called that idea “hyperbole.” He told CPR the voter rolls are bloated, with more people joining than leaving.

On voter ID, Gonzalez answered that Colorado already requires it. She said more than 90 percent of Colorado voters cast the ballots mailed to them, and more than 80 percent had signed up for mail ballots before the state went all-mail.

She described bipartisan ballot-handling teams, documented chain of custody, paper ballots and risk-limiting audits. She opposed letting counties run substantially different procedures.

Wiley’s rebuttal went to the audits themselves. Chain of custody begins only once ballots reach election officials, he argued, and voters cannot independently inspect the proprietary software inside a voting machine.

Hand counting is legal in Colorado

Election officials object to Wiley’s plan on cost, speed and accuracy. None says it is illegal.

Colorado Revised Statutes 1-5-601(1) says votes “may be cast, registered, recorded, and counted by means of an electronic or electromechanical voting system as provided in this part 6.” Permissive, not required.

And one Colorado county already does it the other way. San Juan County, with 723 active voters, counts entirely by hand, Sandra Fish reported in June for the Colorado Capitol News Alliance.

Wiley wanted that at scale, in schools. RMV reported his plan in April, in a profile by Jen Schumann.

Every school would become a voting center. Students would train in counting through the year and work alongside adults on Election Day.

“Counties spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on electronic voting equipment,” he said. “Why can’t we spend that on people?”

Wiley, 33, lives in Holyoke, in Colorado’s far northeast corner. He grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan, where his missionary family did humanitarian work. He moved to Pueblo as a teenager.

He served as executive director of the Colorado Libertarian Party before joining the Republican Party in 2025.

Her record in Jeffco

Gonzalez has been clerk since 2023. The office failed to legally notice the November election that year.

Jeffco’s senior elections project coordinator, Cynthia Rasor, wrote to participating local governments on Nov. 30, 2023, that “it came to our attention that our office failed to publish notice of this election in a general circulation newspaper within 20 days of the election.” Rasor called it a “regrettable consequence” of staff transitions and said the office had added checklists and protocols.

Complete Colorado, published by the Independence Institute, obtained the emails.

C.R.S. 1-5-205 requires that notice be published no later than 20 days before the election.

The office she now takes over cleared the office she runs. State Elections Director Judd Choate determined Jeffco had “substantially complied,” the standard in C.R.S. 1-1-103, with no corrective action needed. That finding reaches the public through an email from Arvada’s deputy city attorney to a city councilman, quoted by Complete Colorado, rather than from Choate directly.

A former Republican secretary of state and a former deputy said the requirement no longer carries the weight it once did. Former Secretary of State Scott Gessler and former Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Taheri both told Complete Colorado as much, with Taheri noting every voter gets a ballot 22 days out.

Gonzalez defended a January 2024 staff appreciation party, paid for with tax dollars, where staff received AirPods, a robot vacuum and a telescope while county commissioners weighed budget cuts. She called it retention spending, said her election workers had endured threats, and said most of her staff make $22 to $24 an hour and she cannot give raises, CBS Colorado reported.

She said the money came from savings on unfilled positions and that senior staff were not eligible for the gifts, which were awarded by drawing.

In June she sent the U.S. Postal Service a 13-page letter opposing a proposed rule, drawn from Executive Order 14399, that would require election offices to hand USPS a list of every voter scheduled to receive a ballot before any could be mailed, per Denver7.

“Inserting people who are not elections experts just creates an environment for confusion and errors,” she said.

What lands on her desk

About 800,000 ballots incorrectly included Issue 7A, the Front Range Passenger Rail sales-tax measure, in parts of Adams, Arapahoe, Douglas and Weld counties. The rail district apologized to the four county clerks for the lack of communication that caused the error, and said the bill updating its boundaries had arrived on a compressed calendar, according to CPR.

Jon Caldara, president of the Independence Institute and head of the committee that opposed the measure, has called for it to be invalidated. A Secretary of State spokesperson said that would be for the courts.

Then there is the federal appeal. The United States sued Colorado’s secretary of state in August, and the case is now before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, docketed as No. 26-1326.

One response brief covering Griswold and five other appellees is due Dec. 4, and lawyers from the attorney general’s office are defending her.

Gonzalez inherits the office that is the named defendant.

Griswold won the attorney general’s race Tuesday. The AP called that one too.

Gonzalez also takes on the confidential-voter fixes Griswold’s office said it was putting in place after it exposed the personal data of confidential voters in August, and the recommendations that followed the 2024 password leak.

She takes office Jan. 12, 2027.