Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold believes the state’s elections are safe and secure under her watch—even if she, herself, is now at risk.
At about 10 a.m. on Monday, the eve of Super Tuesday, the Supreme Court released its unanimous decision that former President Donald Trump was eligible to appear on the 2024 Colorado election ballot. Shortly after this news broke, Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, posted on social media that she was “disappointed” in the Court’s ruling, and that, in her view, the justices were stripping states of their authority to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Sitting in her downtown-Denver office yesterday afternoon, Griswold showed me some of the DMs she’d received over the previous 24 hours. “Well, one of the things—you probably don’t want to print this—is I’m being called a cunt every two minutes,” she said.
Her eyes wide and intense, she was the image of a person on high alert: . Strangers had been able to get ahold of her personal cellphone number. Messages of this nature had been coming in for a while. In one saved voicemail from her office line that she played for me, a caller told Griswold that he hopes “some fucking immigrant from fucking Iran cuts her kids’ heads off” and “somebody shoots her in the head.” His monologue lasted more than a minute and a half and concluded with a warning: “I’ll be seeing you soon.”
Griswold is in the last two years of her second and final term (her position is term-limited). Secretary of state is the first public office she ever sought, and she refused to say whether she’d run for a different position in 2026. Griswold, who was a relatively unknown Democrat in a purple state, was elected when she was just 33. She has been outspoken in her belief that Trump is a danger to democracy, but her job, by design, has a certain neutrality to it. At least, it once did.
Although statewide elected officials have always faced harsh public criticism and intense scrutiny, the vile tenor of the Trump era has changed the reality of the role. Yesterday, Griswold said that the Supreme Court ruling, while technically the “conclusion” of the Trump Colorado-ballot affair, will likely not mark the end of the threats and harassment she’s facing. If anything, the Court’s decision bolstered the notion that Trump is above the law, and may have even emboldened his cultlike supporters to continue to act out. Last night, Trump vanquished his final Republican challenger, the former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, in all but one of the Super Tuesday states. Haley dropped out of the race this morning, clearing the path for Trump altogether.
Trumpism isn’t going anywhere. And calling Trump a threat to democracy, or expressing her displeasure with the Supreme Court ruling, may well open Griswold up to more vitriol. Like other state-level bureaucrats, she has had to figure out in real time how to respond to the threat of Trump and his extremist followers.
“Those who do not speak up when they’re in positions of power become complicit,” she said. “Those who do speak up do not automatically become partisan. And I think that’s an argument from the far right: that speaking out for democracy is in some way partisan.”
As Super Tuesday kicked off, Griswold met me at a ballot-processing center in Jefferson County, a blue suburban and rural area about half an hour west of Denver. Wearing an Apple watch and blue blazer, she was trailed by aides and one security official as she walked through the front door. Her focus, at least in that moment, was to show me how safe and secure she believed Colorado’s elections had grown under her watch—even if she, herself, was now more at risk.
