Colorado Supreme Court committee advances election-related change, goes back to work on magistrate rules | Michael Karlik/Colorado Politics

The Colorado Supreme Court’s civil rules committee approved a procedural change for court challenges to presidential electors, a move that complies with legislation passed this year. The committee also heard from the Supreme Court that it must perform further work on proposed changes to the rules governing magistrates, after the justices heard criticism from some judges and attorneys this week. State lawmakers enacted Senate Bill 210 during the 2024 legislative session, addressing a wide range of elections topics. One provision added new language for legal challenges to presidential electors, requiring filings in the Supreme Court within 24 days of Election Day and obligating the court to prioritize such challenges “over all regular business.” Read Article

National: Jury finds MyPillow founder defamed former employee for a leading voting equipment company | Colleen Ylevin/Associated Press

A federal jury in Colorado on Monday found that one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, defamed a former employee for a leading voting equipment company after the 2020 presidential election. The jury found that two of Lindell’s statements about Eric Coomer, the former security and product strategy director at Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, including calling him a traitor, were defamatory. It ordered Lindell and his online media platform, formerly known as Frankspeech, to pay Coomer $2.3 million in damages, far less than the $62.7 million Coomer had asked for to help send a message to discourage attacks on election workers. “This is hurting democracy. This is misinformation. It’s not been vetted and it needs to stop,” Charles Cain, one of Coomer’s attorneys, told jurors in closing arguments Friday. Read Aerticle

Colorado election officials react to federal request for voter data, eye political motives | Tom Hesse and Anthony Cotton/Colorado Public Radio

An expansive request for Colorado’s election records by the U.S. Department of Justice has leading election officials in the state wondering if the ask might be the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of a former Mesa County Clerk now incarcerated at La Vista Correctional Facility. The letter, first reported by NPR, was sent to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in May and requested all election records relating to the state’s 2024 federal contests, under a provision of the Voting Rights Act. Griswold told Colorado Public Radio she thinks this has less to do with the events of November and more to do with October, when former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years incarceration for her role in allowing unauthorized access to county voting equipment. Read Article

Colorado: Trump’s DOJ makes its most sweeping demand for election data yet | Miles Parks and Jude Joffe-Block/NPR

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding an unprecedented amount of election data from at least one state, according to documents obtained by NPR, as the DOJ transformed by the Trump administration reviews cases targeting the president’s political allies and caters to his desire to exert more power over state voting processes. On May 12, the Justice Department asked Colorado’s secretary of state to turn over “all records” relating to 2024 federal elections, as well as preserve any records that remain from the 2020 election — a sprawling request several voting experts and officials told NPR was highly unusual and concerning, given President Trump’s false claims about elections. “What they’re going to do with all this data, I don’t know,” said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. “But I’m sure they will use it to push their ridiculous disinformation and lies to the American public.” Read Article

Colorado Attorney General says Trump administration cannot free former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters | Anthony Cotton/Colorado Public Radio

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said Wednesday that the federal government has no standing to free former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters from jail. “We have our own system,” Weiser said in an interview with Colorado Matters. “This is what our constitution calls federalism. We enforce our criminal laws and the federal government can’t hijack that system. They have to honor it. We are a separate sovereign.” Peters was found guilty last August by a jury of Mesa County residents on seven counts, including four felonies, after she helped facilitate unauthorized access to county voting equipment that she was supposed to safeguard in search of voter fraud. She was sentenced to nine years in prison. Read Article

Colorado: Trump calls for former county clerk Tina Peters to be released from prison | Katie Langford/The Denver Post

President Donald Trump on Monday called for former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to be released from prison, where she is serving a nine-year sentence for a voting data scheme related to the 2020 presidential election. Peters is a “political prisoner” and “hostage,” Trump said in a Monday night post on Truth Social, describing her case as “communist persecution by the radical left Democrats.” Peters’ case was prosecuted by a Republican district attorney and she was convicted of several felonies related to unauthorized access to state voting machines, including giving a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell so the man could access Mesa County’s election system in an unsuccessful search for voter fraud. Read Article

Colorado lawmakers approve voting rights bill, despite pushback from election officials | Chas Sisk/Aspen Public Radio

Colorado lawmakers are sending the governor a measure meant to shore up voting rights. The move is part of a national effort to write protections established by the federal Voting Rights Act into state laws. But it comes despite opposition from local officials, who have argued the law could upend decades-old practices. Backers cite the gradual weakening of the Voting Rights Act and recent attacks from the Trump administration on state voting laws to argue that there’s a need for state legislation. But pushback has come from local officials, including some representing progressive parts of the state. They say the measure could reopen settled legal questions about voting practices that some could argue are discriminatory. Those include electing officials at large, which can keep minority candidates out of office, and holding local elections in the spring or summer, when turnout tends to be lower. Read Article

Colorado fights Trump administration bid to help imprisoned loyalist Tina Peters | Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

Colorado officials say President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be wielding its “political power” to give unprecedented help to a former county election clerk who was convicted of allowing Trump supporters to access election equipment after his 2020 defeat. The U.S. Justice Department is trying to insert itself into the case of former election clerk Tina Peters, who wants to be released from prison while she appeals her conviction. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in federal court in Denver. It’s one of the latest Trump administration moves to reward allies who violated the law on the president’s behalf. Peters’ case is among those the government has said it is reviewing for “abuses of the criminal justice process.” Read Article

Colorado lawmakers back new election process for appointed legislators | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

Colorado lawmakers on Monday backed a pair of bills to reform the much-maligned process that helped seat nearly a quarter of the legislature, while rejecting a competing proposal that would’ve required changing the state constitution. The two favored bills, which cleared an initial House committee, are essentially a package aimed at changing the vacancy-filling process: House Bill 1315 would allow lawmakers appointed via a vacancy committee to serve no more than a full session in the Capitol before standing for an election, while House Bill 1319 would enact similar election parameters for vacancy-appointed commissioners in large counties. Both bills are bipartisan, and they passed the House’s State, Civic, Military and Veteran Affairs Committee in succession. The often-criticized vacancy committee process is used when an elected official leaves office early. That official’s party then convenes a committee of party officials and volunteers to elect a new representative. Read Article

Colorado calls DOJ interest in Tina Peters’ case a ‘grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law’ | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

Colorado is asking a federal judge in Denver to reject the U.S. Justice Department’s statement of interest in the case of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. In its filing, the state writes that the DOJ intervention has no legitimate basis and is a “grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law.” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser submitted the filing Tuesday in response to the DOJ’s statement of interest. “The United States cites not a single fact to support its baseless allegations that there are any reasonable concerns about Ms. Peters’ prosecution or sentence, or that the prosecution was politically motivated,” writes Weiser. Read Article

Colorado: Justice Department is reviewing prosecution of clerk who supported Trump’s election lies | Nicholas Riccardi and hristina A. Cassidy/Associated Press

The Department of Justice is backing a former county election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in allowing supporters of President Donald Trump to access confidential data about the 2020 election, the latest move by the administration to use its power to reward allies who violated the law on the president’s behalf. Peters has become a celebrity in the world of those who embrace Trump’s lies that he lost the 2020 election due to fraud. Her supporters have been pushing the new Republican administration to pressure Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, to pardon her. Read Article

Colorado appeals court greenlights Dominion Voting defamation claims against conservative radio host | Michael Gennaro/Courthouse News Service

A Colorado Court of Appeals panel ruled unanimously Thursday morning that a former Dominion Voting Machines employee could seek defamation claims against a conservative radio host and the Denver network that hosts his show after the host claimed in 2020 that the employee had antifa ties and was attempting to fix the 2020 presidential election. Following President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election, Randy Corporan, an attorney who hosts a conservative radio show, interviewed Joseph Oltmann, a Castle Rock-based businessman who claimed he heard a man identified as “Eric from Dominion” say on an antifa conference call that he was going to make sure Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Read Afticle

Colorado: Investigation finds election equipment passwords were posted accidentally, but safeguards also lacking | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

A law firm has concluded that the online posting of passwords for Colorado’s election machines happened inadvertently, but did violate some policies. The Secretary of State’s office hired the Denver-based firm Baird Quinn LLC to investigate after the security breach came to light this fall. In her 19-page report, attorney Beth Quinn wrote that the incident was preceded by a unique set of circumstances that would have been difficult to anticipate. According to the investigation, the employee who originally created the hidden tab of passwords had no expectation the spreadsheet, which also listed technical information about the state’s voting equipment, would ever be posted online. And she had left the office by the time other staff decided to put the document on the department website, in a bid to increase transparency. Read Article

Colorado’s election equipment password breach explained | Bente Birkeland and Kiara DeMare/Colorado Public Radio

The revelation that BIOS passwords for ballot tabulation machines in 32 of Colorado’s 64 counties were posted for months in a hidden tab on a spreadsheet on the Secretary of State’s website set off statewide shockwaves in the days before the November election. The Secretary of State’s office was originally notified by an election equipment vendor who had spotted the tab. The passwords were removed on Oct. 24, after being online since June. Shawn Smith, a retired Air Force Colonel and conservative activist, wrote in an affidavit that he discovered the hidden tab much earlier, on Aug. 8, and checked twice in October that it was still there, without informing the state. The public became aware through an email the Colorado Republican Party sent to its supporters on Oct. 29. Read Article

Colorado: Denver DA investigates Secretary of State election system password breach | Sam Tabachnik/The Denver Post

The Denver district attorney has launched an investigation into how a spreadsheet of voting system passwords ended up on the Colorado secretary of state’s website earlier this year. The DA’s office on Monday would not divulge additional details of the probe beyond confirming an open investigation. On Oct. 29, Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced that a spreadsheet posted publicly on her office’s website for several months “improperly included” a hidden tab that displayed passwords protecting Colorado voting machines in many counties. The office categorized the breach as accidental. Griswold is not the focus or target of the DA’s investigation, according to an email obtained by The Denver Post that was sent by Beth McCann, the district attorney, to the office. Read Article

Colorado voters reject sweeping elections overhaul backed by wealthy donors | Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline

Colorado voters on Tuesday rejected a sweeping plan to overhaul the state’s elections system hatched by some of the state’s wealthiest and most influential political donors. The measure proposed to abolish party primaries for most state and federal offices, replacing them with “all-candidate” primaries for each race, and established ranked choice voting for general elections. The Colorado measure was one of six on the ballot in 2024 bankrolled by the nonprofit Unite America, which backed a successful effort to establish such a system in Alaska in 2020. The group is co-chaired by Kent Thiry, former CEO of Denver-based dialysis services company DaVita, who previously sponsored successful efforts to open Colorado’s primaries and create independent redistricting commissions. Read Article

Colorado voting system passwords were posted to secretary of state’s website | Keely Quinlan/StateScoop

Passwords to certain components of Colorado’s voting system were posted publicly on the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office website under a hidden tab of a spreadsheet, according to a discovery made Tuesday. Discovery of the posted passwords was shared on Tuesday in a mass email from Colorado Republican Party Vice Chair Hope Scheppelman. The mass email, Denver’s 9NEWS reported, included an affidavit from a person, whose name was redacted, who claimed they’d downloaded the spreadsheet file from the website and discovered the hidden tab by simply clicking “unhide.” The passwords included in the hidden tab were used to configure voting machine system settings, 9NEWS reported, and make up one part of the security process for Colorado’s voting machines. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold told 9NEWS on Tuesday that the spreadsheet containing the passwords had been on the office’s website for several months, and that she was only made aware of the error this week before taking it down. Read Article

Colorado: Scheme to cast votes on stolen mail ballots thwarted by election officials | Jesse Paul/Colorado Sun

Colorado election officials say they have thwarted an effort to fraudulently cast votes on batch of stolen mail ballots in Mesa County. The scheme was blocked through the state’s voter signature verification process, which checks the signatures on mail ballots against the signatures the state has on file for each voter. If the signatures don’t match, election officials reach out to the voter to offer them an opportunity to remedy the situation through a process known as “curing.” When election officials recently reached out to a group of voters to help them cure the signature problems with their ballots, the voters informed the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office that they hadn’t voted. That triggered an investigation and led to the discovery of a dozen stolen and fraudulently cast ballots. Read Article

Colorado voting machines not connected to the internet | Sara Wilson/Colorado Newsline

Most counties in Colorado have upgraded their voting systems equipment since 2020 to models that physically cannot connect to the internet, and those that rely on older machines are statutorily required to disable any wireless capability. Election officials say that even the older models do not create a vulnerability in the voting system, as some conservative politicians and activists claim. “This is a known thing amongst the counties and amongst the Secretary of State’s office — that the (wireless) card was physically present, and so that there’s a couple of steps that were taken to ensure that it wasn’t activated or present,” Boulder Clerk and Recorder Molly Fitzpatrick, a Democrat, said. Read Article

Colorado judge who sentenced Tina Peters to prison receives threats | Amy Beth Hanson/Associated Press

A rural Colorado county courthouse beefed up security Friday after threats were made against staff and a judge who sentenced former county clerk Tina Peters to nearly nine years behind bars and admonished her for her role in a data breach scheme catalyzed by the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump. Courthouse staff in Grand Junction, Colorado, received multiple threats that were being vetted by law enforcement while extra security was provided, said spokesperson Wendy Likes with the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office. She did not say how many threats were made or how they were received. She also declined to describe the extra security. Read Article

Former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters sentenced to 9 years for voting data scheme | Mead Gruver/Associated Press

A judge ripped into a Colorado county clerk for her crimes and lies before sentencing her Thursday to nine years behind bars for a data-breach scheme spawned from the rampant false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race. District Judge Matthew Barrett told former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters — after earlier sparring with her for continuing to press discredited claims about rigged voting machines — that she never took her job seriously. “I am convinced you would do it all over again if you could. You’re as defiant as any defendant this court has ever seen,” Barrett told her in handing down the sentence. “You are no hero. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.” Read Article

Colorado: On Native land, a new push to expand voting meets the long tail of state violence | Alex Burness/Bolts

Lorelei Cloud was born in 1967, three years before Native Americans living on tribal lands in Colorado were guaranteed the right to vote. Even once she turned 18, and for many years thereafter, she did not vote. Her polling place was in Durango, miles from the Southern Ute Indian Tribe Reservation, where she lived, and she had no car with which to access registration services or to cast a ballot. Politicians seldom visited her area, and hardly seemed to represent her interests, anyway. Cloud is now vice chair of the Southern Ute tribal council, and from the tribe’s headquarters early this summer, she reflected on how much has changed. Since 2019, when Democrats gained a legislative trifecta in the state, Colorado has established a polling place on the reservation and placed a drop box there for mail ballots. The state has also hired special liaisons to promote and facilitate turnout among Native voters. “I don’t want future generations to have to deal with any of what we’ve had to, to get to vote,” Cloud told me. “We should have access to the vote, to shape our own region, our own country.” Read Article

Colorado: Former Pro-Trump County Clerk Is Found Guilty of Tampering With Voting Machines | Alan Feuer and Nick Corasaniti/The New York Times

Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, was convicted on Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump. After nearly five hours of deliberations, a jury in Grand Junction found Ms. Peters guilty of seven criminal charges connected to her efforts to breach a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The jury determined that Ms. Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Trump’s defeat to Biden. Ms. Peters is set to be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face multiple years in prison. Read Article

Colorado judge denies acquittal to Tina Peters in charges related to voting machine data leak | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News Service

A Colorado judge on Thursday denied a motion for judgment of acquittal filed by Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk and recorder facing criminal charges related to a 2021 voting machine data leak. “Considering all of the forgoing evidence and in light of the charges that have been filed, the court does conclude the people have established sufficient evidence in both quantity and quality that proves her guilt beyond the reason of doubt,” 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett, an appointee of Democratic Governor Jared Polis, said from the bench. Following seven days of witness testimony from state and Mesa County elections administrators, as well as an employee of Dominion Voting Systems, and a man who’s identity was misused in the leak, prosecutors rested their case Thursday. Read Article

Colorado elections manager in voting machine tampering trial felt ‘sick’ seeing passwords online | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News

Before a jury on Thursday, Colorado’s voting systems manager recalled feeling sick when he first saw Mesa County’s voting machine passwords posted online in August 2021. Prosecutors called Jessi Romero, voting systems manager for the Colorado secretary of state, as a witness in their case against Tina Peters, Mesa County’s former clerk and recorder now on trial for charges related to helping leak voting machine data in 2021. Prosecutors say that in May 2021, Peters instructed her deputy clerk to turn off security cameras and arranged for an associate to observe and photograph the voting machine trusted build, an update process conducted in person since the machines can’t connect to the Internet. Peters then reportedly sent data and passwords to a Florida-based company for analysis and allowed them to be posted on the social media site Telegram by Ron Watkins, a key player in the QAnon conspiracy movement. Read Article

Colorado official faces trial following ‘Big Lie’ election conspiracies | Amanda Pampuro/Courthouse News Service

A faithful Republican living on Colorado’s conservative western slope, Tina Peters watched the 2020 presidential results with concern. Still, as the duly elected clerk and recorder for Mesa County, Peters was confident in the integrity of the election she had overseen. After all, nearly two-thirds of local voters backed then-President Donald Trump that November, also helping to lift Lauren Boebert into Congress. Fast forward five months later, to April 2021, and Grand Junction voters overwhelmingly rejected the most conservative city council candidates. Belief in the “Big Lie” about a stolen 2020 election had become a litmus test for Republican Party loyalty — and Peters began to question whether she could really trust the Dominion voting machines in her county. She voiced her concerns to Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, but they went ignored. Read Article

Colorado: Federal judge rejects voter intimidation lawsuit midway through trial | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

A federal judge in Denver ruled against the plaintiffs in a voter intimidation lawsuit Thursday, ending a trial early after finding the organizations behind the suit hadn’t presented sufficient evidence against a group of Donald Trump supporters. U.S. District Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney issued her ruling Thursday morning. The trial had started Monday, more than two years after the lawsuit was filed by a trio of voting and civil rights organizations, including the local chapters of the NAACP and the League of Women Voters, against the U.S. Election Integrity Plan. That group, made up of supporters of the Republican former president and tied to prominent and discredited election conspiracy theorists, had been accused of questioning residents of high-density areas and places where ethnic and racial minorities live about their votes. Read Article

Colorado Lawmakers Send Bills on AI, Deepfakes to Governor | Government Technology

During a busy legislative session, Colorado lawmakers are addressing various technological issues, including deepfakes, facial recognition, and consumer protection from AI. Senate Bill 24-205, which has cleared the legislature, regulates “high-risk AI systems” impacting critical infrastructure, mandating risk management policies and impact assessments to prevent discrimination. House Bill 24-1147, targeting deepfakes in political communications, criminalizes deceptive portrayals of presidential candidates and imposes civil penalties for misusing deepfake technology. Read Article

Colorado Lawmakers Pass First-in-Nation Mandate for Voting Centers in Jails | Alex Burness/Bolts

Scott Deno, overseeing Colorado’s largest jail in Colorado Springs, emphasizes facilitating voting for incarcerated individuals, yet a recent admission reveals zero votes cast in the last election among the jail’s population. This issue extends statewide, with only 231 jail votes in Colorado during the 2022 general election, despite a daily jail population of 6,000, disproportionately Black and Latinx. The passage of Senate Bill 72, awaiting Governor Jared Polis’s signature, aims to rectify this, mandating polling stations in local jails during general elections and establishing ballot drop-off locations, making Colorado the first state with such a requirement. Read Article

Colorado officials warn of new frontier in election denial as more Republicans refuse to certify vote totals | Nick Coltrainb/The Denver Post

Colorado election officials from both major parties say a typically innocuous step in the certification of vote totals has increasingly been seized upon by activists to cast doubt over state elections. Since 2020, a small but growing number of county canvass boards have had Republican members refuse to sign off on vote tallies, according to state records. Those objections haven’t jeopardized the actual certification of elections, and Colorado’s system has additional processes in place to stop rogue canvass boards from preventing the finalizing of results. But it serves as an ill omen of potential efforts to sow distrust in voting heading into this year’s primary and general elections, several state and county election officials said in interviews with The Denver Post. Read Article