This story was first published at Colorado Newsline.
DENVER | Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said President Donald Trump’s administration has “lost credibility” on election security issues after a Wednesday call between top state elections officials and federal law enforcement agencies.
Griswold, a Democrat who is also a 2026 candidate for Colorado attorney general, echoed concerns from other Democratic secretaries of state over what they characterized as administration officials’ refusal to acknowledge states’ constitutional role in overseeing U.S. elections. Staff from Griswold’s office participated in the call, which was organized earlier this month by FBI election executive Kellie Hardiman. It included representatives from the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Election Assistance Commission.
“Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of confidence or trust at this point with previously important federal relationships,” Griswold said.
Griswold and other state elections officials are especially critical of Heather Honey, an election conspiracy theorist appointed last year as deputy assistant secretary of election integrity at DHS. Honey, a former private investigator, rose to prominence in election-denial circles in the months after the 2020 election by releasing a report falsely claiming that the number of ballots cast in Pennsylvania that year exceeded the state’s number of registered voters. Trump cited her flawed analysis in his speech on the White House ellipse just prior to the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection.
Claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent or compromised have been debunked by elections officials, experts, media investigations, law enforcement, the courts and Trump’s own campaign and administration officials.
During the call Wednesday, Honey dismissed as “disinformation” the possibility that federal immigration agents could be deployed to voting locations in November, as urged by top Trump ally Steve Bannon earlier this month. A statement released by Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, quoted Honey as saying, “Any suggestion that ICE will be present at any polling location is simply not true.”
Trump’s DOJ has sued at least 24 states, including Colorado, to obtain unredacted voter rolls containing sensitive personal information as part of its attempts to uncover evidence of voter fraud or voting by noncitizens, which researchers and elections officials describe as “infinitesimally rare” and “virtually non-existent.” Trump himself earlier this month said Republicans “ought to nationalize the voting.”
Michael Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, released a statement Wednesday describing the call with federal officials as normal and reporting that the officials “reaffirmed state officials’ primary role in the election process.” But Democratic secretaries of state disputed that characterization.
“It was deeply unsettling the DOJ and DHS refused to acknowledge that, according to the U.S. Constitution, states run elections in America,” Fontes said.
Griswold, who has served as Colorado secretary of state since 2019, also pushed back on Republicans’ assertions that Wednesday’s briefing was “perfectly normal.” Though a conversation between the state’s elections division and federal law enforcement authorities isn’t unusual in and of itself, she said it’s been far more common for her office to engage with regional DOJ and FBI officials they have longstanding relationships with.
“They usually happen at a more local level. There have been nationwide calls sometimes, but it’s not so typical,” Griswold said. “What is so unusual (is) that we would get a request from the FBI, from an agent that is unknown to the election community, for this nationwide call.”