Jena Griswold, who sought to keep Trump off the presidential ballot, is required to release records that may reveal deceased individuals registered to vote.
Jena Griswold, Colorado’s left-leaning Secretary of State known for her efforts to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot, has faced another setback in federal court regarding election law.
Last week, the U.S. District Court for Colorado ordered the Democrat secretary of state to disclose Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) reports that are suspected of containing names of deceased voters on the state’s rolls. These reports include individuals who may have passed away within the last three years.
This ruling marks another important victory for election integrity advocates, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), and yet another defeat for Griswold and ERIC in their efforts to limit election transparency.
“PILF has knocked down ERIC’s wall of secrecy in the voter list maintenance process,” J. Christian Adams, president of the election integrity watchdog organization, said in a press release. “States cannot use third parties to hide election records that the public has a right to see.”
Griswold ultimately signed the stipulation after the court denied her initial request to dismiss the case. Judge Philip Brimmer ordered her office to release the requested 2021 ERIC Reports by November 1. He permitted limited redactions to the ERIC Report Key. With this agreement, the judge dismissed PILF’s claim that Griswold violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) of 1993.
Many states have exited the voter registration data-sharing partnership due to ERIC’s membership agreement, which prohibits public disclosure of certain records. PILF contends that this lack of transparency contravenes the NVRA, which safeguards the public’s right to access voter rolls and voter list maintenance records.
The act provides that each “State shall maintain for at least 2 years and shall make available for public inspection … all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters.” Exceptions include confidentiality of individuals who decline to register to vote and “the identity of a voter registration agency through which any particular voter is registered.”
Thanks to PILF’s lawsuits, ERIC, established by left-leaning election law advocate David Becker, has revised its demands for secrecy.
Brimmer’s order represents the third time a court has required ERIC to disclose records. PILF has achieved similar legal victories in Alaska and the District of Columbia, each overturning ERIC’s confidentiality agreement with member states that shielded them from public scrutiny. The Alaska case set the precedent for subsequent orders compelling ERIC to comply with the law and release its data reports to the public.
“States that are members of ERIC should take note of these three victories and disclose their ERIC data reports,” Adams said.
PILF has a similar case pending in federal court in Louisiana, which has been ongoing since 2022.
Since her election in 2018, Griswold has built a concerning record as Colorado’s Secretary of State. In 2022, her office “mistakenly” sent postcards to approximately 30,000 foreign nationals urging them to vote, attributing the error to a database glitch related to Colorado’s driver’s license list. This incident raised significant alarms among election integrity advocates about the risk of noncitizen voting in U.S. elections, a concern that has intensified in the 2024 election cycle.
At the time, the Republican National Lawyers Association pointed out that a similar issue had led to the resignation of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, a fellow Democrat, after a “glitch” potentially allowed thousands of ineligible immigrants to vote. In contrast, Griswold was easily re-elected shortly after her election integrity mishap.
Last year, she pleased her leftist allies by supporting a lawsuit aimed at removing Trump from Colorado’s presidential ballot. The left-leaning Colorado Supreme Court agreed with the argument that Trump disqualified himself from running due to accusations from political opponents regarding his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results. However, the U.S. Supreme Court firmly rejected this notion, ruling 9-0 that states lack the constitutional authority to remove Trump from the primary ballot.
This ruling was a significant blow to the Democratic Party, Trump-opposing media, and legal “experts” who had supported the misguided idea that states could enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Only Congress holds the enforcement power for this provision, which was established after the Civil War to disqualify individuals who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States from holding office.
As the Supreme Court highlighted, efforts to exclude Trump from the ballot could have sparked retaliatory actions by red states.
“An evolving electoral map could dramatically change the behavior of voters, parties, and States across the county, in different ways and at different times,” the court held. “Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos — arriving at any time or different times, up to and perhaps beyond the Inauguration,” the ruling states.
While she has attempted to distance herself from the case, Griswold vigorously argued for Trump’s removal from the ballot before the U.S Supreme Court.
“Just as Colorado cannot be forced to place on its presidential primary ballot a naturalized citizen, a minor, or someone twice elected to the presidency, it also should not be forced to include a candidate found by its courts to have violated his oath to support the Constitution by engaging in insurrection,” Griswold wrote in a brief.
The Democrats’ efforts to disenfranchise millions of voters highlight who is genuinely threatening democracy.
“They talk about Trump being a threat to democracy, but you never saw him trying to force his opponents off ballots,” Lauren Bis, PILF’s communications director, told The Federalist. “He’s not the threat. People taking unprecedented actions to have people removed from the ballot so voters can’t vote for their candidate of choice, that’s the real threat.”
