The Trump campaign is demanding action after the Colorado Secretary of State’s office said it had accidentally posted county voting system passwords publicly on its website for months.
Lawyers for former President Donald Trump told Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Wednesday to order county clerks to temporarily stop processing mail-in ballots until county election systems can be reconfigured after the password leak was discovered. The voting system passwords from nearly every Colorado county, for equipment like vote tabulating machines, were posted to the Secretary of State’s office website in June and could be viewed by clicking “unhide,” according to The Denver Post.
Griswold, who is facing calls to resign from Republicans over the security breach, has said that the password leak did not compromise election security because the state’s voting system had multiple safeguards in place. Still, Trump’s campaign is pushing for further transparency.
“We are particularly concerned because your office knew of this security breach at least as early as October 24, yet concealed the problem by failing to notify anyone,” Trump lawyer Scott Gessler wrote on Wednesday. Gessler asked Griswold to order impacted counties to take steps to reprogram the election machines and said that it was “essential that you act immediately to protect the integrity of Colorado’s general election.”
“We recognize these steps may be an inconvenience for your office and for the affected counties. But this inconvenience is necessary because it is the only way to guarantee that the elections equipment in those counties whose current BIOS [basic input/output system] passwords were disclosed by your office are secure and that the chain-of-custody for that equipment required by Colorado law and regulations is unbroken,” he wrote.
In a Thursday response to Trump and the Colorado Republican Party, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Beall wrote that officials became aware of the breach last week.
“It was quickly determined that the spreadsheet presented no immediate threat to the security of Colorado’s voting systems or the 2024 General Election,” Beall wrote. “The Department determined that because Colorado’s voting systems are protected by layers of security and redundancies, no single error can compromise the integrity of the system.”
Beall said state cybersecurity experts would go to impacted counties to update voting systems’ passwords. CBS reported that Griswold’s office did not immediately inform county election officials after discovering the security lapse.
“Unfortunately, clerks found out about it from an email that came from the state GOP, which was incredibly disappointing,” Colorado County Clerks’ Association Matt Crane told CBS Colorado. “If a mistake happens in a county, counties have to report that out to the state immediately. And so with something like this, when it is such so severe in nature, potentially severe, we think that the first call should have been to the county, so that we could have taken a look at our systems and at our security processes and make sure that everything was okay.”
Griswold’s handling of the incident has drawn criticism from Republicans in Colorado, including former Deputy Secretary of State Suzanne Taheri. Taheri said that Griswold was trying to downplay the mass posting of the passwords.
“She’s trying to say that in order to get in, you need both passwords,” Taheri told CBS. “Well, not really. The first password, as long as you’re physically there, you could then plug a USB into the computer, bypass the system password and get in and start doing whatever you wanted with the software.”
Griswold has so far resisted calls to resign, saying there were no serious consequences from the breach.
“No, I’m not going to resign,” Griswold told Denver7. “A civil servant in the department made a serious mistake that we have actively taken action to remedy. Humans make mistakes. And that’s why I’ve been so focused on adding more layers of security to our elections.”
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