(EL PASO COUNTY, Colo.) — On Friday, Nov. 1, El Paso County Clerk and Recorder Steve Schleiker requested Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s resignation after partial passwords for the state’s voting system were posted online.
“I am writing to formally request your resignation as Colorado Secretary of State due to significant concerns over election integrity and incidents that have occurred during your tenure,” Schleiker said in the letter to Griswold. “Your leadership has been marked by several high-profile security breaches that have compromised public trust in our electoral process”
The letter was sent four days after Colorado’s Republican Party accused the Secretary of State’s Office of “quietly” removing a spreadsheet from its website containing BIOS passwords for election systems in 63 of 64 counties. The GOP said more than 600 passwords were publicly accessible without encryption. BIOS, or Basic Input/Output System, enables a computer’s operating system to function.
After the incident, a Colorado Secretary of State spokesperson said a spreadsheet with “partial passwords to certain components of Colorado voting systems” was mistakenly included in a hidden website tab. The office stated the leak poses no immediate threat to elections or ballot counting, citing multiple security layers, including two unique passwords for each election system component, managed separately by different parties, and that the passwords require in-person access to voting systems.
Griswold’s office confirmed that on Thursday, Oct. 31, all impacted passwords had been changed and security verified with assistance from eight Department of State staff and 22 state cybersecurity personnel.
In the letter to Griswold, Schleiker said, “Colorado election protocols mandate that clerks report and document election incidents immediately to the Secretary of State’s Office, as specified in Election Rules [8 CCR 1505-l]. However, your office has not consistently adhered to these standards of transparency, particularly in instances where errors originated from your office.”
Schleiker said that the delayed response from Griswold’s office “placed clerks across the state in a position where they were unprepared to address voter and media concerns.”
In addition to the partial BIOS password exposure, Schleiker referred to other “critical incidents,” such as the alleged issuance of voter registration cards to ineligible individuals and what Schleiker referred to as a “reporting error” from Griswold’s office during the 2021 election night.
“These incidents have placed an unwarranted burden on clerks and recorders across the state, whose tireless efforts to uphold election integrity are compromised by recurring missteps and lapses in communication,” said Schleiker.
FOX21 News reached out to Colorado Secretary of State Griswold’s Office and at the time of this article has received no response. However, in a previous response, Griswold said that she will stay in office and help make sure the election is safe and secure.
“We took steps to pull the information down, immediately began investigating further, communicated with federal election security partners, and already had elections personnel in the field before we received the letter (from the Colorado Republican Party),” the office stated. “The Department’s top priority was to investigate, fix anything that needed fixing, and then inform the public.”
