Griswold elected attorney general, and inherits the office that defended her

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

Jena Griswold will be Colorado’s next attorney general.

The Democrat secretary of state defeated Republican Michael Allen. The Associated Press called the race at 8:08 p.m., when Griswold led with 59.2 percent of the vote to Allen’s 40.8, according to The Colorado Sun.

By the state’s around that time, the Secretary of State’s results page showed Griswold with 1,160,835 votes, or 58.81 percent, to Allen’s 813,122, or 41.19 percent. Nineteen of the state’s 64 counties had reported complete results.

She moves from one statewide office to another.

Griswold has run Colorado’s elections since 2019 and is term-limited. She won a four-way primary in June over Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty, former federal prosecutor Hetal Doshi and attorney David Seligman.

The result continues a streak in which no Republican has won statewide office in Colorado since 2016.

What the race was argued over

Allen built his campaign on one claim about the job, and he put it plainly in a debate at the University of Denver in October.

“I’m the only person that’s in this race today that knows how to fight in a courtroom,” the district attorney for El Paso and Teller counties said.

Griswold did not contest the point. She reframed the job instead.

“I have the experience that matters most to Coloradans, and that is standing up to Trump and MAGA to protect our state,” she said.

The argument had been running since the primary. In a December 2025 fundraising email, in a letter to Colorado Democrats before the March precinct caucuses and at a virtual appearance with Longmont Area Democrats on March 2, Griswold said she had argued at the U.S. Supreme Court that Donald Trump should not be eligible for president.

She had not. Colorado Solicitor General Shannon Stevenson argued the case, and Attorney General Phil Weiser’s office filed the briefs.

Kyle Clark reported for 9News in March that the claim was false, and the station’s legal analyst, Scott Robinson, a criminal defense attorney who has argued before the court himself, called it “inaccurate and, quite frankly, a misrepresentation.”

Her campaign said in a statement that “the word ‘argue’ does not exclusively mean oral argument,” and did not answer whether she has joined the Supreme Court Bar. Asked whether she had ever argued a case before any court, the campaign named one, in District of Columbia Superior Court in 2011 or 2012, and would not provide details that would allow the claim to be confirmed, citing the involvement of minors.

The office she inherits

Weiser’s office has filed or joined about 90 lawsuits against the Trump administration since January 2025, and what happens to them was the second argument of the campaign.

Griswold ran on continuing them, and on filing more. Allen said he would reconsider them case by case, and warned at the debate against what he called political litigation.

The case with her name on it

One of the fights over Trump administration demands went the other direction. The federal government sued her, and she won.

The Justice Department asked Colorado on Dec. 1, 2025, to sign an agreement handing over complete voter data, including names, dates of birth, residential addresses and either full driver’s license numbers or the last four digits of Social Security numbers. Griswold turned it down.

“The DOJ can take a hike; it does not have a legal right to the information,” she said.

The department sued her on Dec. 11, 2025. Chief Judge Philip Brimmer dismissed the case with prejudice on Aug. 3, and the department appealed.

It is now before the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Weiser’s office must file the response brief for Griswold and the groups that intervened on her side by Dec. 4, 2026.

In January that office becomes hers, and she remains a named appellee.

Her record at the Secretary of State’s office

Two terms running Colorado’s elections also produced at least three avoidable disclosures, all of them in election years. In 2022 the office mailed postcards urging roughly 30,000 noncitizens to register to vote, which it blamed on a formatting error.

In 2024, partial BIOS passwords for voting equipment in 34 of the state’s 64 counties sat in a hidden worksheet of a spreadsheet published on her office’s own website. It went up June 21, four days before that year’s primary, and stayed up until Oct. 24, more than four months later.

The office did not find it on its own. It learned of the disclosure from a voting machine vendor, and many county clerks had already heard of it from a Colorado Republican Party press release.

Gov. Jared Polis sent state cybersecurity personnel to help reset the passwords, which the office finished by Oct. 31. The outside review her office commissioned found it had violated two policies, one on training and one on reviewing documents before they are posted publicly.

It also concluded the posting was unintentional, and made seven recommendations the office said it would adopt.

Then in August, an update to the office’s voter lookup tool overrode the setting that kept confidential voters’ records out of public view. Colorado had 133,449 active confidential voters at the time. The records stayed exposed for 11 days.

Fifty-nine profiles were pulled up before the office caught the error, which it noted was 0.04 percent of the total. It emailed or called the 54 voters it had contact information for and mailed letters to the other five.

Griswold said most of those searches were confidential voters looking up their own records, but acknowledged it was “the majority, but not all.”

Allen said he was among the 59, and told a news conference on Aug. 31 that his protected information “was apparently accessed twice.”

“I sincerely regret that this happened,” Griswold said in an Aug. 27 statement. “My staff identified this issue, and we immediately fixed it and are continuing outreach to affected voters.” She said the change had not been caught in a third review before it went live, and that the office was adding automated testing.

What Allen said

Allen conceded in a speech to supporters at a Republican watch party in Colorado Springs, where he thanked volunteers, donors, endorsers and staff.

“Tonight’s definitely not the outcome that we wanted, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise,” he said, CPR reported.

He said he had congratulated Griswold.

“Friends, the voters of Colorado have made their decision and I respect that decision… I’m obviously disappointed, but I’m not discouraged about Colorado’s future.”

He said his party has a lot to learn.

“We need to listen more. We cannot simply tell Coloradans what we’re against. We have to do the hard work and show them what we’re for.”

The office she takes over enforces Colorado’s data-protection and privacy laws. She has also promised to expand its litigation against the federal government.

Griswold’s term begins Jan. 12, 2027.