Colorado fought scrutiny—until a lawsuit forced a cleanup

By RMV Editorial Board | Rocky Mountain Voice

Back in 2019, Colorado’s voter rolls were already showing the problem—if anyone in charge had been willing to look at them.

Forty counties had more registered voters than eligible citizens.

Call it whatever you want—but it’s not normal.

That wasn’t a partisan claim. It wasn’t a social media theory. It was data.

And for a long time, it just sat there.

No press conference. No urgency. No statewide fix.

Then something happened.

Someone sued.

The lawsuit no one was supposed to take seriously

Eventually, someone stopped waiting for the state to act.

By October 2020, it had crossed a line.

Judicial Watch took it to federal court, filing suit against Jena Griswold under the National Voter Registration Act.

And behind it—three Colorado voters. El Paso. Adams. Elbert. Names attached.

Not activists in Washington. Not anonymous accounts online.

Actual voters.

Colorado wasn’t doing what federal law already requires—keeping its voter rolls current and clearing out names that shouldn’t be there.

A federal court allowed the case to proceed.

That matters.

Because for years, concerns about voter roll accuracy were treated like something beneath serious discussion—something fringe, something to dismiss.

Until they weren’t.

What changed when the courts got involved

The case didn’t end in a courtroom showdown.

It ended in a settlement.

In March 2023, Colorado agreed to resolve the lawsuit.

The terms were not symbolic.

For the next six years, the state must provide detailed voter roll maintenance data annually.

And something else had already happened—quietly.

Once the lawsuit was filed, voter roll removals increased by 78 percent.

Not after a new law. Not after a public campaign.

After legal pressure.

Since the lawsuit and settlement, 372,000 inactive or ineligible names have come off Colorado’s voter rolls.

You probably didn’t hear about it.

Judicial Watch announced April 8, 2026 that 372,000 ineligible or inactive names have been removed from Colorado’s voter rolls following litigation and settlement.

The state didn’t announce that.

The settlement required the state to provide annual data to Judicial Watch.

The part no one wants to connect

Colorado officials still insist the system works.

They point to layers. Safeguards. Processes.

And yet: A federal lawsuit forced increased cleanup activity.

Names were removed by the hundreds of thousands. 

And on top of that, some of those ballots mailed never made it to the right person. More than 323,000 came back as undeliverable in a single year.

Take El Paso County. When they actually dug into it, they found tens of thousands of addresses didn’t line up—including more than 51,000 mismatches on one run.

El Paso County Clerk Steve Schleiker acted on it.

The state didn’t.

A bill to expand that verification process statewide died in committee. Party-line vote.

So here is the unavoidable question:

If the system was already working, why did it take a lawsuit—and a county workaround—to fix it?

Now Colorado is fighting oversight itself

On March 31, a new federal executive order aimed at election integrity was signed.

Three days later, Colorado joined a lawsuit to block it.

The order would require states to verify citizenship using federal data and strengthen list maintenance.

Instead of engaging the issue, the state’s response has been to tell the federal government to stay out of it.

That argument might carry more weight if Colorado had not just spent three years under a federal settlement requiring outside review of its voter rolls.

The state opposed that lawsuit too.

It settled only after changes began happening.

Now it’s back in court—this time arguing that oversight itself is the problem.

That’s not a contradiction.

That’s a pattern.

The legal ground is shifting beneath Colorado

This debate is not staying in Colorado.

It is moving through the courts.

In January 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7–2 in Bost v. Illinois that candidates have standing to challenge election rules.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Candidates have a concrete and particularized interest in the rules that govern the counting of votes…”

That puts Colorado’s Secretary of State race in a different light.

Because candidates raising these issues are no longer operating in the margins.

They are operating within recognized constitutional ground.

Then, in March, the Court heard arguments in Watson v. RNC.

At issue: whether ballots received after Election Day can be counted.

Colorado’s system sits directly in that path.

This isn’t just a Colorado issue—the direction this is going nationally is hard to miss.

Colorado’s leadership is still pushing the other way.

The official at the center of it all

This all circles back to one name: Jena Griswold—the official who had to be sued in 2020.

She agreed to six years of reporting under the settlement.

She is now running for attorney general.

If she wins, the same official who had to be sued to comply with federal voter roll law will oversee election litigation for the entire state.

That includes future challenges to Colorado’s election system.

Voters should understand what that means.

Because this is not about personality.

It is about the record.

What voters are actually being asked to decide

This week, RMV profiled candidates in the Secretary of State race.

James Wiley keeps circling back to the same point. Elections should be something people can actually watch, understand, tally and verify—not something handled inside a system they’re barred from examining the internal workings of.

J.J. McKinzie comes at it from the other side. McKinzie looks at the foundation—voter rolls, audits with county clerks and cross-checking registrations against federal and state data.

However you come at it, the question’s the same: how do you know it’s accurate?

Not how we feel about it.

How do we verify it?

That question has now been asked in courtrooms, not just campaigns.

And it has produced real outcomes.

From “conspiracy theory” to cleanup

For years, raising concerns about voter roll accuracy in Colorado was enough to get labeled a conspiracy theorist.

Now the Secretary of State frames it as routine maintenance. For years, it was brushed off as nothing. Not only does that fail to square, it’s an insult to anyone who cares about the sanctity of their vote.

And if you’re still calling that conspiracy theory or election denialism, take a step back and look at the scale. Hundreds of thousands of names removed after a lawsuit. More than 323,000 ballots coming back undeliverable in a single year.

At some point, that stops being something you can just wave off.

What’s worse, the question itself had to be forced into the open.

By a lawsuit.

By voters working together with elected officials to bring in outside data that people actually keep current, because their money depends on it.

By people willing to put their names on the line.

Now it’s voters’ turn

The numbers were there in 2019. Ignored.

In 2023, it took a lawsuit to force movement.

Now it’s 2026, and the focus has shifted to keeping the federal government in its lane—
not what it took to get the state to act in the first place.

April 11, at the Republican state assembly, is where that record gets put to the test.