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On Friday, November 15, the Colorado GOP posted bombshell audio on X.

"BREAKING: Yesterday afternoon, the Colorado GOP released an audio recording on our website exposing @COSecofState CO Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) & her team hiding leaked voting machine passwords from county clerks to avoid a 'media frenzy.' A Democratic clerk's response? 'It's bullshit.'"

During the Libertarian Party of Colorado (LPCO) vs. Griswold & Beall hearing on Monday, November 4, Deputy Secretary of State Chris Beall testified that the Colorado Department of State (CDoS) was working to mitigate the breach and had not yet decided if they were going to inform the clerks at the time the story broke.

There are many issues with this testimony — devices in the county's custody were implicated in the breach, for example — but stick a pin in that for a moment and take the testimony at face value. Beall painted a picture of an engaged CDoS IT team, working with CISA and other official actors to mitigate the breach.

Now recall that, when news of the breach broke, Secretary Griswold went on Kyle Clark's program on 9News and told the world that this was not a security breach at all, and CDoS was just operating out of an abundance of caution.

This was the official story. CDoS has it under control and are working hard to mitigate any potential implications out of an abundance of caution.

With that in mind — the official public and under oath statements from the top two officials at CDoS — consider the audio:

"We were not going to tell counties because we could not tell counties without becoming the media storm it has become." This is the reason that Chris Beall gave to County Clerk & Recorder Josh Zygielbaum (D-Adams) for why the clerks were not notified of the breach.

This is very important. This is a different answer than Beall gave under oath.

The Deputy SecState effectively admits to the cover up in this audio. The Colorado Department of State, at the very top, refused to tell the clerks about the BIOS breach because they didn’t want a "media storm."

In the middle of the election — during early voting — CDoS decided to leave the infrastructure exposed to avoid bad press. This is literally Beall’s excuse for not informing the clerks. It’s captured on audio.

Now take the pin out of the unanswered question. The clerks have custody of the impacted devices. Under oath, Beall said, paraphrasing, that they were still determining if they needed to inform the clerks at the time the story broke. But in the audio, Beall says they were not going to tell the clerks.

That means they were not going to change the device passwords until after the story broke.

They cannot access the devices, which are in the custody of the clerks, without notifying the clerks. If they weren't going to tell the clerks, that means they were going to leave the devices exposed...with their passwords open to everyone on the internet...during the voting period...when more people are in proximity to the machines than at any other point in the year...to avoid a media storm.

Secretary Griswold and every other mouthpiece for this scandal have been quick to claim that the CDoS BIOS leak is different from the Tina Peters BIOS situation in Mesa.

It is different. It's way worse.

It also implicates the entire department as they were admittedly, actively engaging in a cover up at the time the news of the leaked BIOS passwords broke.

Beyond scandalous, but not terribly surprising. This is the logical conclusion of centralizing elections oversight in the hands of the people who banned independent forensic audits.

Every single person in Colorado, regardless of race, party, or socioeconomic status, should be livid.

Centralization requires complexity and complexity breeds and hides corruption.

It's a good thing, then, that President-elect Trump appears to be appointing cabinet members based on their ability to root out systemic corruption. For elections, corruption is enmeshed between levels of government — federal, state, local — and enabled through public private partnerships with corporate vendors and NGOs.

The the DOJ, as we have seen during the Biden era, can certainly prosecute state and local actors for corruption. This should be priority one. Decentralize our elections, return authorities to the counties, and prosecute the criminals in the CO Department of State.

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