More than a third of Colorado’s local election officials have left their jobs in the last three years thanks to term limits and harassment-fueled fatigue, sparking concerns ahead of next fall’s presidential contest.
The departures mean that nearly half of Coloradans live in a county with a new clerk overseeing elections, according a new report released Tuesday by Issue One. The national bipartisan reform group, based in Washington, D.C., studied election worker turnover in 11 Western states and found that in all, the region has lost more than 160 top local election officials in the past three years.
Twenty-four of them were in Colorado, producing turnover in 38% of its counties. Those counties are home to about 48% of the state’s residents.
While several clerks have left office because of term limits for county clerk and recorders, many have departed of their own accord. A chief reason, observers said, has been the threats and harassment levied at election workers since the 2020 election, which thrust the often-mundane elected position into the center of conspiracy theories stoked by then-President Donald Trump and his supporters following his loss to Joe Biden.
“It’s the inevitable outcome, as we warned about, when lies and disinformation and death threats have become somewhat of a way of life for election officials,” said Matt Crane, the executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association. “So you see a lot of people who were experts in their field say, ‘I don’t need this. I’m going to go home to my family and get out of this craziness.’ “
Though neighboring states lost a higher proportion of their local election officials than Colorado, the report says, those who departed office here took with them 314 years’ worth of election experience, more than any other Western state.
Before last year’s midterm elections, county clerks told The Denver Post that they had been threatened and were bracing for continued election denialism.
Crane said he expects the fall 2024 election to be worse and more conspiracy-laden than 2020. That makes him concerned about so many new clerks being thrust into such a challenging environment.
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said Tuesday that she was confident the state would hold “great elections” next year, pointing to the enduring experience brought by rank-and-file election staffers. Both her office and the clerks association have offered training, and new clerks have been connected with veterans in other counties as mentors to get them up to speed.
But usually it takes a full four-year cycle for a clerk to become fully comfortable with election processes, Crane said, and “it’s a tough time for on-the-job training.” Griswold said that election workers “are bracing for a wave of threats and political violence in 2024.”
The heightened outside scrutiny gives new county clerks and their teams little leeway, said Michael Beckel, the research director for Issue One. Clerks who increasingly have been inundated with lawsuits and records requests must now become experts in misinformation and security, in addition to their standard election duties and day-to-day county records work.
“Every election has its challenges, and even mundane administrative mistakes have the potential to be interpreted as malicious by hyperpartisan activists,” Beckel said. “Nobody wants that.”
“It’s a huge concern,” Crane added. One minor mistake can fuel lawsuits and enduring conspiracy theories, he said.
The Issue One report calls for increased support for local election officials, including for Congress to provide more funding and improve protections for election workers. Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, told the report’s authors that “increased federal funding would have an enormous impact as we work to recruit, train and retain the next generation of election professionals.”
Griswold, who has also faced threats, said her office has a dedicated team to support local election officials and detect security breaches. She said additional funding and support, both federal and local, is vital.
“For the last four years, election workers have dealt with disinformation, threats, extreme pressure and increased workload from misinformation and bad faith, which does take a human toll,” she said. “The atmosphere is wearing on election workers.”
Other Western states, particularly those that were electoral battlegrounds in 2020, experienced a more significant exodus among their local election officials in the years since. Eighty percent of Arizona counties, for instance, have seen top election officials leave their roles.
Though Colorado did not experience the same level of election denialism as some swing states, it’s still been touched by those same debunked conspiracies.
Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk in 2020, has been indicted on allegations that she illegally accessed and copied election equipment after Trump’s loss. John Eastman, a lawyer who aided Trump in his failed attempts to overturn the election, was a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder and more recently has represented the state Republican Party. Dave Williams, who was elected chair of the state GOP in March, falsely has claimed that Trump beat Biden in 2020.
The state also has taken steps to address the conspiracies and threats facing election workers here.
In June 2022, Gov. Jared Polis signed a law that made it a crime to threaten election officials or to publish their information online in order to encourage harassment of them. He also signed a law requiring new security measures for election equipment.
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