Judge Throws The Book At 69-Year-Old Tina Peters For Minor Infraction Because She Believes The 2020 Election Was Stolen
The judge clearly went overboard and illegally focused on Tina Peters’ constitutionally protected viewpoint about election theft.
Confidential passwords to voting systems were inadvertently posted on the Colorado secretary of state's public website for months before being removed. Despite this, officials maintained this leak is "not a security threat" to elections.
The passwords were publicly visible on a spreadsheet posted to the website with a hidden tab that included over 600 partial passwords to Colorado's voting systems in 63 of Colorado's 64 counties. The passwords were "discreetly" removed from the website on Thursday after being listed since at least August, according to a press release from the Republican Party of Colorado.
'At best, even if the passwords were outdated, it represents significant incompetence and negligence, and it raises huge questions about password management and other basic security protocols at the highest levels within Griswold's office.'
"To be very clear, we do not see this as a full security threat to the state. This is not a security threat," Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold told KUSA. "There are two passwords to get into any voting component, along with physical access. We have layers of security and, out of just an abundance of caution, have staff in the field changing passwords, looking at access logs, and looking at the entire situation and continuing our investigation."
"We hear all the time in Colorado from Secretary Griswold and Governor Polis that we represent the 'gold standard' for election integrity, a model for the nation," Dave Williams, chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado, said in a statement. "One can only hope that by the secretary posting our most sensitive passwords online to the world dispels that myth."
This is not the first time Colorado has faced scrutiny over security lapses and election integrity. Under Griswold's purview, 30,000 noncitizens in Colorado mistakenly received voter registration mail in 2022. Despite past and present hiccups, Griswold and Colorado officials maintain that their elections are airtight.
"It's shocking, really," Williams said in the press release. "At best, even if the passwords were outdated, it represents significant incompetence and negligence, and it raises huge questions about password management and other basic security protocols at the highest levels within Griswold's office.
"This type of security breach could have far-reaching implications, putting the entire Colorado election results for the vast majority of races, including the tabulation of the presidential race in Colorado, in jeopardy unless all of the machines can meet the standards of a 'trusted build' before next Tuesday," Williams continued.
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President Joe Biden's top political rival will appear on the ballot in the Centennial State, to the chagrin of Democrats and other leftists who routinely express concerns about threats to democracy.
The Democrat-appointed justices on the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in December that former President Donald Trump could not appear on the ballot in the state. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously reversed that decision Monday, underscoring that Congress, not the states, is "responsible for enforcing Section 3 [of the 14th Amendment] against federal officeholders and candidates."
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold made her disappointment known in liberal circles while her defeated equivalent in Maine walked back a similar effort to disenfranchise voters.
Griswold, a Democrat, told Scripps News last year that she believed the Colorado "court's decision was right."
"I believe that Jan. 6 was an insurrection, and I'll go even further in saying that Trump incited it," said Griswold. "So the wording of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is clear: It says that any person that swears to uphold the Constitution, and then engages in insurrection or rebellion, subsequently cannot hold office."
After her understanding of the Constitution was found wanting by the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, Griswold told Politico, "It's concerning that federal candidates, at this point, can engage in insurrection and then face no accountability for ballot access."
"This decision did not surprise me, given the oral arguments," said Griswold. "I'm disappointed; I think states under federalism should be able to enforce the clear words [of Section 3]."
Griswold added that "it's up to the American people to save democracy in November," echoing Biden's go-to insinuation that democracy is reliant upon the empowerment of a single political party.
The Colorado secretary recycled these remarks on MSNBC, again underscoring her disappointment over the high court's ruling in Anderson v. Griswold ruling. However, Griswold went on to denigrate the one political body constitutionally permitted to take that action she previously figured executable by a partisan state court.
"Ultimately this decision ... leaves open the door for Congress to act, to pass authorizing legislation," said Griswold. "But we know that Congress is a nearly non-functioning body."
Since neither Democrat-appointed justices in Colorado nor lawmakers in the nation's capital will be able to prevent voters from casting ballots for Trump, Griswold reiterated that the fate of the nation "will be up to the American voters."
Democrat Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold says her reaction to the Supreme Court's unanimous decision is "disappointment."\n\n"It will be up to the American voters to save our democracy in November."— (@)
Griswold was evidently not the only liberal upset over the high court's ruling.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the liberal activist group that represented the petitioners in the Colorado case, similarly did not take the loss well.
CREW president Noah Bookbinder, up until recently a member of the Biden Department of Homeland Security's Homeland Security Advisory Council, said, "The Supreme Court removed an enforcement mechanism, and in letting Trump back on the ballot, they failed to meet the moment."
Like Griswold, Bookbinder suggested it is once again "up to the American people to ensure accountability."
While Bookbinder stressed that "this was in no way a win for Trump," he will be on the ballots today in two other states that disqualified the Republican front-runner.
Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows issued a modified ruling Monday walking back her Dec. 28 disqualification of Trump, wherein she stressed, "Democracy is sacred."
"I have reviewed the Anderson decision carefully. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that individual states lack authority to enforce Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment with respect to federal offices," wrote Bellows. "Consistent with my oath and obligation to follow the law and the Constitution, and pursuant to the Anderson decision, I hereby withdraw my determination that Mr. Trump's primary petition is invalid."
Votes cast for Trump in Tuesday's primary will, as a result, be counted.
It's also game over for the Section 3-based disqualification in Illinois, where a Democratic judge heavily based her removal ruling on the Colorado Supreme Court's arguments.Consequently, Trump will be on the primary ballot on March 19 in the Prairie State.
Free Speech for People, the leftist advocacy group that represented the five men who petitioned to have Trump removed from the ballot in Illinois, said in a statement following the Anderson ruling, "The U.S. Supreme Court today has made a mockery of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
The group suggested further that the ruling was "dangerous."
"This decision is disgraceful," said Rob Fein, the legal director of the leftist outfit. "The Supreme Court couldn't exonerate Trump because the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming, so instead the Justices neutered our Constitution’s built-in defense against insurrectionists and said the facts don't matter."
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A liberal activist group based in Washington, D.C., that claims to want to "shore up our democracy against attacks" is working to keep President Joe Biden's top rival off the ballot in Colorado for the 2024 election.
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a group that has been called a "lapdog to left-leaning politicians" and has sought to hamstring former President Donald Trump since 2016, filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Denver District Court on behalf of six purported Republican and unaffiliated Colorado voters. The suit demands that Trump be removed from the GOP primary ballot and "any future election ballot" for supposedly having "disqualified himself from public office by violating Section 3 of the 14th Amendment."
CREW alleged in a statement that Trump, now leading Biden in CNN's latest general election poll, violated his oath to preserve and defend the Constitution "by recruiting, inciting and encouraging a violent mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021 in a futile attempt to remain in office."
The 115-page suit, which regurgitates Jan. 6 committee talking points and appears to cite Trump's recent indictments as supporting evidence for his ineligibility, names Colorado's Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold as a defendant. According to the complaint, Griswold should already have excluded Trump from the primary ballot.
Griswold — who happens to have beaten the daughter of one of the petitioners in an election for her current role — responded to the suit, stating, "I look forward to the Colorado Court’s substantive resolution of the issues, and am hopeful that this case will provide guidance to election officials on Trump’s eligibility as a candidate for office."
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), who has similarly been met with requests to remove Trump from the ballot ahead of the 2024 election, has suggested that doing so in his state or elsewhere would "only reinforce the grievances of those who see the system as rigged and corrupt," further underscoring in the Wall Street Journal that "denying voters the opportunity to choose is fundamentally un-American."
"Invoking the 14th Amendment is merely the newest way of attempting to short-circuit the ballot box," wrote Raffensperger. "Mr. Trump might win the nomination and general election. Or he could lose. The outcomes should be determined by the people who show up to make their preference known in primaries (including Georgia’s on March 12) and the general election on Nov. 5. A process that denies voters their chance to be the deciding factor in the nomination and election process would erode the belief in our uniquely American representative democracy."
The Associated Press noted that whereas various "fringe figures" across the country have sued in vain citing the clause, the legal resources behind this latest effort are substantial. The firms Tierney Lawrence Stiles LLC, KBN Law LLC, and Olson Grimsley Kawanabe Hinchcliff & Murray LLC are representing this play.
Among the petitioners named in the suit are Norma Anderson, Michelle Priola, Claudine (Cmarada) Schneider, and Krista Kafer.
Anderson, an on-again, off-again Republican from Lakewood, served in the state House from 1987 until 1998, then served in the state Senate from 1999 to 2005. She is the mother of failed Colorado secretary of state candidate Pam Anderson.
Priola is the wife of Democratic state Sen. Kevin Priola.
Schneider is a former Republican U.S. representative from Rhode Island.
Krista Kafer is a Never-Trumper Denver Post opinion writer, according to KMGH-TV.
While seeking to eliminate the sitting president's opposition from contention, CREW president Noah Bookbinder said, "If the very fabric of our democracy is to hold, we must ensure that the Constitution is enforced and the same people who attacked our democratic system not be put in charge of it."
Bookbinder, like CREW, is hardly nonpartisan. In addition to obsessing about Trump in the pages of the Washington Post, he is ostensibly tight with the ruling power. He was appointed by Biden's Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the DHS Advisory Council in March 2022. Influence Watch noted that in his previous capacity as chief counsel for criminal justice for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Bookbinder worked in support of Senate Democrats to support their leftist agenda.
"We aren’t bringing this case to make a point, we’re bringing it because it is necessary to defend our republic both today and in the future," continued Bookbinder. "While it is unprecedented to bring this type of case against a former president, January 6th was an unprecedented attack that is exactly the kind of event the framers of the 14th Amendment wanted to build protections in case of. You don’t break the glass unless there’s an emergency."
CREW has asked the court to expedite the anti-democratic motion so that Trump can be stricken from the ballot before it is set on Jan. 5, 2024, reported the Associated Press.
Donald Sherman, CREW's chief counsel, told reporters, "We understand that there’s great interest in states across this country about this question, and it needs to be resolved expeditiously so there’s clarity."
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