What is your vision for being our state’s Secretary of State?

The Secretary of State plays a role in enforcing campaign finance laws. How would you ensure these laws are applied fairly, consistently, and without partisan bias?  How would you monitor and enforce regulations regarding campaign and lobbyist financial disclosures?

As Secretary of State, how would you ensure voter registration lists are accurate, up to date, and compliant with state and federal law?

It’s easy to lay out broad data-driven plans for verifying database entries and they will be critical, but will never get voter rolls to 100% accuracy on their own. Verifying names, addresses, and other key contact info against other reliable sources will serve as an excellent start – drivers license records, state tax data, state university enrollment data, and others could serve as a foundation for quality control checks of our voting records. Once those have been tackled, we can work with county election officials to contact voters who could not be verified, in order to validate data for the remaining voters. This would be an ongoing process, not a one-and-done step.

To what extent should Colorado counties determine and manage their election processes through their local Clerk and Recorder office, and which parts of the election process should be determined and managed by the Secretary of State’s office?  What steps would you take to protect Colorado’s election systems from cybersecurity threats while maintaining accessibility and efficiency for voters?

Nobody on their own can manage something as complex as a statewide election – coordination and collaboration with county clerks is essential. Many county officials are already experts in many processes they’ve used over the years, and I look forward to working with the county clerks to develop a common system that is easy for the voter, transparent for the public, and thorough for the administrators. The precise line of where state responsibility ends and county responsibility begins must be determined as part of that development.
All trust must be earned, and we will work together to earn the trust of the voters in Colorado.

Do you support Colorado’s continued use of third-party electronic voter data systems like the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) system?  Please explain.

In engineering, we only approve designs and plans if we have personally reviewed them or they were prepared under our clear direction with our full trust in how they were developed. I believe this is a good model. I am open to working with any person or organization which can help us to ensure that our records are thorough, accurate, and worthy of high esteem. However, no organization outside of our own state office should be blindly followed. Resources such as the ERIC system can help identify cases of possible errors that should be individually reviewed by our office; they should not be treated as authoritative data sources to confirm or override our own records.

What role, if any, should federal agencies play in supporting or overseeing state election systems?

If federal agencies seek our same vision of transparency and accessibility as a means to rebuild trust with voters, then I am open to working with them just as I wish to collaborate with county officials. Shared access to social security address and contact information, tax data, passport records, and others could help facilitate review of our own data. This is a role of federal support, not federal control.