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stated on October 30, 2024 in an X post:

“The lady who leaked passwords for voting systems in Colorado is the same person who tried to remove Trump from the ballot.”

By Sofia Ahmed November 2, 2024

X posts miscast Colorado official's role in lawsuit to get Trump off the ballot, voter machine issue

If Your Time is short

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said an employee who no longer works for the department accidentally publicly posted partial passwords to Colorado’s voting machines. A team is working to update the compromised passwords, she said.
Griswold wasn’t a plaintiff in the 2023 lawsuit to remove former President Donald Trump from Colorado’s primary presidential ballot — she was a defendant. During the Colorado Supreme Court case, she did not take a position on the ballot question but said the court would decide whether Trump would be disqualified from the election.
When the U.S. Supreme Court challenged Colorado’s decision to remove Trump from the state’s ballot, Griswold said Trump should stay off the ballot.

See the sources for this fact-check

The Colorado secretary of state’s office accidentally published some voting machine passwords online ahead of Election Day, which led some social media users to disparage that office’s elected leader, Jena Griswold.

"The lady who leaked passwords for voting systems in Colorado is the same person who tried to remove Trump from the ballot," the X account Libs of TikTok posted Oct. 30 with Griswold’s photo.

An Instagram user shared a screenshot of the post, and it was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

The social media posts exaggerate the details of what happened and make it sound as if Griswold personally or maliciously leaked information that endangered the election process. That’s not what happened. And Griswold didn’t file the lawsuit that sought to remove former President Donald Trump from Colorado’s primary ballot in 2023; she was a defendant in the case.

Griswold told Colorado Public Radio on Oct. 30 that an employee who no longer works for the department accidentally posted a spreadsheet on the Colorado secretary of state’s website that contained a tab with passwords to Colorado’s voting machines. She added that secretaries of state do not have access to voting machine passwords.

The passwords were taken down Oct. 24 after being publicly available for several months, Griswold told KUSA-TV, a Denver-based NBC affiliate. Each voting machine requires two passwords, and the spreadsheet contained one of the two, Griswald said.

A team is updating the compromised passwords, Axios reported. Besides the two passwords, the voting machines require security clearance to access.

Libs of TikTok, which PolitiFact has previously fact-checked, said Griswold is "the same person who tried to remove Trump from the ballot." That’s also not right.

In September 2023, six Colorado voters sued Griswold and demanded that she remove Trump from Colorado’s presidential primary ballot for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election results. The voters cited the 14th Amendment’s insurrectionist clause as grounds for their lawsuit.

X posts

stated on December 1, 2024 in a post

Kash Patel posted on X that “the FBI is gay.”

Griswold "was a defendant in this lawsuit, and did nothing to initiate it," Jack Todd, a secretary of state’s office spokesperson, told PolitiFact.

The Colorado Supreme Court, siding with the plaintiffs, decided Trump should be removed from the state’s primary ballot for his involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, but the U.S. Supreme Court later overruled that decision.

Griswold did not take a position on the lawsuit before the state court’s ruling, saying the decision on whether Trump would be disqualified "has to be decided by a court, not the public opinion of the nation."

When the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, Griswold said Trump should be kept off Colorado’s ballot.

"Colorado should be able to bar oath-breaking insurrections from our ballot," Griswold posted on X, saying she was "disappointed" by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision.

Our ruling

The Libs of TikTok X post said, "The lady who leaked passwords for voting systems in Colorado is the same person who tried to remove Trump from the ballot."

Griswold did not personally leak Colorado’s voting machine passwords. Some were compromised after an employee, who no longer works for the department, accidentally posted a spreadsheet with a tab containing the passwords online.

Separately, Griswold was a defendant in the lawsuit to remove Trump from Colorado’s presidential primary ballot last year, and did not initiate the effort. She supported it when it was challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The statement contains an element of truth — someone in Griswold’s office accidentally posted partial voting machines passwords online — but it ignores critical facts that would give a different impression. We rate the claim Mostly False.