Colorado Secretary of State Bans Third Parties From Accessing Voting Systems

Poll workers check in voters at a polling location on election day in Denver, Colo., on Nov. 3, 2020. Chet Strange/AFP via Getty Images

The office of Colorado’s Secretary of State announced on Thursday that it is adopting “emergency elections rules” to ban third parties from accessing voting equipment in the state.

Effective immediately, the new rules prohibit any third-party individual or vendor from accessing any component of a county’s voting equipment in Colorado, according to a news release.

“My office just issued rules prohibiting sham election audits in the State of Colorado,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said on Twitter. “We will not risk the state’s election security nor perpetuate The Big Lie. Sham audits have no place in Colorado.”

“The Big Lie” is a term being used by some establishment media, Democrats in Congress, as well as President Joe Biden, to refer to and refute allegations of potential voter fraud and irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.

Per the rules, a person can only access a county’s voting system if they are an employee of the county clerk, an employee of the voting system provider, an employee of the Secretary of State’s office, or an appointed election judge. They must also have passed a comprehensive criminal background check.

Griswold, whose office is in charge of overseeing elections and was responsible for the 2020 election, said in another statement that her state’s elections are considered the “safest in the nation” and that officials “must remain steadfast in our dedication to security.”

Seven Colorado House Republicans in December 2020 called for a third-party probe—meaning not by the Secretary of State’s Office—into election software and voting machines in the state to address the allegations of election fraud regarding the November election, reported the Denver Post.

The Centennial state’s latest “emergency” election rules will also allow its Secretary of State’s Office to “limit or prohibit the use of, as well as decertify, any voting systems component in the event of a break in its chain-of-custody or other hardware security compromises, such that its security and integrity can no longer be verified,” according to the release.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has not issued a public statement on the new rules announced by Griswold as of Friday morning. Polis’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Griswold’s office in the release, took aim at the independent election audit currently underway in Arizona’s Maricopa County, which is expected to wrap up on June 26.

“A third-party vendor with no election experience is currently performing a faulty, unsecure election audit in Arizona and calls for such sham audits have been spreading in other state,” the SOS Office asserted. “Several Colorado counties have been contacted by third parties offering to conduct audits.”

It added, “Colorado already administers post-election Risk Limiting Audits after every statewide election, which gives a statistical level of confidence that the outcome of an election is correct.”

The audit in Maricopa County was ordered by the Arizona Senate, which previously said that its “broad and detailed” audit “will validate every area of the voting process” and includes, but is not limited to, scanning all the ballots, a full hand recount, auditing the voter registration and votes cast, the vote counts, and the electronic voting system. The Arizona Senate has also that its leadership would not be directly involved in the audit process to maintain integrity and transparency.

Griswold’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, which sought for clarification as to why it deems the audit in Maricopa County a “sham” and “faulty, unsecure.”

Arizona Republican Senate President Karen Fann did not immediately respond to The Epoch Times’s request for comment.

Dominion Voting Systems, which says it “proudly serves 62 of 64 Colorado counties,” issued a statement on June 17 saying that the company, as well as Colorado state and local elections officials, “have been unfairly targeted by outlandish, false allegations meant to sow doubt and confusion about the results of the 2020 presidential election.”

The Colorado-based company in its statement said that a risk-limiting statewide audit of the 2020 presidential election “provided statistical confidence in the results of the election.” The scope of the audit was outlined by the SOS Office.

Colorado certified its election on Dec. 8, 2020, giving nine electoral college votes to Joe Biden.