allt around 10 a.m. On Monday, the day before Super Tuesday, the Supreme Court unanimously announced its decision that former President Donald Trump is eligible to run on Colorado's 2024 election ballot. As soon as the news broke, Colorado Secretary of State Jenna Griswold posted on social media that she “disappointed” She thought that in the court's ruling, the justices were stripping states of their power to enforce the 14th Amendment. Sitting in his downtown Denver office yesterday afternoon, Griswold showed me some of the direct mail he'd received over the past 24 hours. “Well, maybe one of the reasons I don’t want to print this is that I get called an asshole every two minutes,” she said.
Griswold read the message aloud, a mixture of anxiety, anger, sadness and determination in his voice. “Karma will be a bitch… Build gas chambers… We're after you… Reap what you sow… Hope you choke to death… Fuck you, ogre… I'm coming … resign now before they catch you… commit suicide in the name of democracy… set it on fire...”
Her large, intense eyes gave her the look of a person on high alert, as if a stranger had gotten her personal cell phone number. Messages of this nature have been coming in for a while. In one of the saved voicemails on her office phone that she played for me, the caller told Griswold that “some fucking immigrant from fucking Iran cut off her kids' heads” and “somebody shot her in the head.” “I hope so,” he said. His monologue lasted over a minute and a half and ended with the warning, “See you soon.”
Griswold is in the final two years of her second and final term (her position is term-limited). Her position as secretary of state was her first public office she has sought, and she has declined to say whether she will run for another position in 2026. Griswold, a relatively unknown Democrat in a purple state, was elected when he was just 33 years old. Although she has been outspoken about her own belief that Trump is dangerous to democracy, her job intentionally has a certain degree of neutrality about him. She did that at least once.
Although elected officials across the state have always faced harsh public criticism and intense scrutiny, the sinister posturing of the Trump era has changed the reality of their role. Yesterday, Griswold said that while the Supreme Court decision is technically a “conclusion” in Trump's Colorado voting case, it will not end the threats and harassment she is facing. If anything, the court's decision reinforced the notion that Trump is above the law and may even have emboldened his cult supporters to continue to act. Last night, Trump defeated his last Republican challenger, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, in all but one of the Super Tuesday states. Haley dropped out of the race this morning, clearing the way for Trump.
Trumpism is not going anywhere. And calling Trump a threat to democracy or expressing dissatisfaction with a Supreme Court ruling may subject Griswold to more vitriol. Like other state officials, she has had to figure out in real time how to respond to the threats from Trump and his extremist followers.
“When you’re in a position of power, people who don’t speak up become complicit,” she said. “Speaking out doesn’t automatically make you a partisan. And I think that’s the argument of the far right that defending democracy is in some way partisan.”
allsuper tuesday After the game started, Griswold met me at a ballot processing center in Jefferson County, a blue suburban and rural county about 30 minutes west of Denver. Wearing an Apple Watch and a blue blazer, she was followed by her aide and a security guard as she walked to her front door. Her focus, at least for the moment, was to demonstrate how safe and secure she believed Colorado's elections had grown under her watch. Although she herself is now in more danger.
Griswold told local news outlets: colorado sun, conducted a recent public opinion poll and found that in the “trust” category, those who “administer elections and count ballots in Colorado” outperform all other categories of citizens. She also said that at the time of last processing, an overwhelming majority of voters, regardless of political party, had used mail-in ballots or mail-in ballots. Nonetheless, a common talking point in the MAGA world is that anything other than old-fashioned same-day in-person voting constitutes voter fraud. In Jefferson County, 95 to 98 percent of all voters, regardless of party affiliation, chose to use ballot drop boxes or vote by mail instead of using traditional voting machines at polling places.
I took an elevator down to the basement of the facility with the Griswold group and Jefferson County clerks to go over the various ballot processing procedures. We wandered down long concrete hallways and toured several windowless rooms that required key card access: a voting room, a signature verification room. In one area, ballots were compressed through a giant machine that workers nicknamed “HAL.” The basement was filled with election judges happily mingling with each other, wearing colored lanyards indicating their political affiliations. Many of these short-term contractors are older and retired. Griswold shook his hand and expressed his thanks. Everywhere we went, people stopped and took notice of her wandering entourage, but it was unclear how many people recognized her.
In Colorado, like other states, vote counting and all related procedures are carried out by a politically diverse pool of workers. But Griswold said that in 2020, some of the state's conservative election judges received “substitute training” about their role from Republican-backed groups and improperly rejected “huge amounts” of legal ballots. In another recent scandal, former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was indicted on 10 counts of charges related to voting system violations. Peters claims she was looking for evidence of voter fraud or tampering in machines made by Dominion Voting Systems, the same company at the center of last year's historic Fox News settlement. (Some of the threats Griswold receives mention Peters' name as if she were a martyr.)
Earlier this morning, a spokeswoman for Griswold said yesterday's Super Tuesday primary went “very smoothly” and “no major issues were reported.” What confusion would have occurred if the court had ruled in a different direction? Could it be that there were two sets of ballots floating around, like alternate Super Bowl victory t-shirts for both teams? Griswold said it would be rare for a court to deem Trump ineligible, but any vote cast for him would have simply been “rejected.” She compared these results to those of other former Republican candidates, such as Vivek Ramaswamy, who is no longer in the race but whose name still remains on Colorado ballots because her office did not receive paperwork to formally remove him. Of course, if Trump's more than 500,000 Colorado primary votes had been “rejected” even by law, another January 6th-like event could have happened. Griswold acknowledged this.
“Unfortunately, we have contingency plans for a lot of things, including 2020. Everything Trump threatened: sending federal law enforcement to polling places, withdrawing voting equipment, and federalizing the National Guard. —I took everything he said very seriously.”
GRiswald has grown up It's located in small, unincorporated Drake, Colorado, not far from Rocky Mountain National Park. In what sounds like a statement she repeats often, Griswold said she lived “on food stamps in a cabin with her own outside bathroom.” She was the first in her family to attend a four-year college. She eventually went to law school at the University of Pennsylvania, leaving her with more than $200,000 in student loan debt. But like everything she said about her shared personal experiences, she was wary of being perceived as weak, helpless, or someone who complained unfairly.
“I think it would be very difficult to do this job if you internalized all the amount of threats and harassment that came in,” she said. “I don’t want you to overlook the fact that I am so sad and everything is getting worse.” She said the harassment campaign had in some ways galvanized her. “It’s very motivating to try to stop those people.”
These threats began trickling in after Trump's defeat in the 2020 election. But their move accelerated last September when Griswold found himself a co-defendant in a lawsuit alleging that Trump's seditious behavior in the final weeks of his term prevented him from holding office again.
In the months since, Griswold has received thousands of horrific messages and threats. She showed me a white document binder almost two inches thick. She receives intermittent physical protection from the Colorado State Patrol, but surprisingly, there is no 24/7 government support. (Instead of a 24-hour State Patrol, Griswold sometimes brings her own personal bodyguard to do her job, the cost of which is covered by her department's budget.) Like former Vice President Mike Pence, those who attended her rallies also spoke to her. They demanded that he be hanged. A man from the Midwest called her office to warn her. The angel of death is coming to get you, in the name of Jesus Christ. “They didn’t know who he was. They just know the phone calls he made,” she said. “And then the phone started moving. The man drove to Colorado. So he was really anxious.”
Griswold said he believes certain people, including Donald Trump and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, “opened these floodgates.” But the problem is much more insidious, she said. “These are people who boycott every Republican election in Congress. “It is all moderate Republicans who refuse to stand up to Donald Trump or condemn conspiracies or political violence.”
Back in her office late yesterday afternoon, I asked Griswold whether she had spoken about her situation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who drew Trump's ire in 2020 and was also threatened.
Griswold said Raffensperger actually “opened the door to his experiences” in private conversations with her, which she said she would not disclose on the record. “Many people, including the Secretary of State, are not living in an environment of constant threat,” she said. “Not every secretary of state goes through this over and over again,” she said. So there aren’t many people who can empathize with what it’s like to live like this.”
She said she believes certain government officials do not take threats against her seriously enough, perhaps because of her gender.
“I’m not saying I’m not angry,” she said. “I don’t think I have any intention of avoiding it. I don’t think I allow it to debilitate me, and that’s a big difference.”
Noah Bookbinder, president of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represented Colorado plaintiffs in the 14th Amendment case, said he believed the lawsuit, even if he lost, proved Trump participated in the insurrection. Bookbinder added that the six Coloradans at the center of the issue are neither extreme liberals nor “Washingtonians” and suggested they “took a lot of risks” to challenge Trump. “These were people who were active in the Republican community and faced some resistance from people they actually knew. And they put a lot on the line to do what they thought was the right thing to do for the country,” he said. In other words, a hero.
Griswold's place in this chapter of electoral history may be less clear. I asked her how she reconciles her anti-Trump stance with her need to remain neutral as an election official. “I don’t think it’s partisan for the number one person to advocate for democracy,” she said. For that matter, it is not about standing up to those who attack our democracy,” she added. “Even if they are the leader of the Republican Party and even if they are President of the United States.”