Colorado is the latest state to have its election system targeted by a lawsuit from a fringe conservative group repeating debunked claims of widespread fraud.
Two Colorado voters and the Missouri-based nonprofit United Sovereign Americans filed a lawsuit against Colorado state officials and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in the U.S. District Court of Colorado on Tuesday, alleging that its analysis of Colorado voter rolls shows the results of the state’s 2022 midterm elections were “unreliable.”
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who is named as a defendant in the lawsuit alongside Attorney General Phil Weiser, called the complaint “a sham lawsuit filed by election deniers as a part of a national campaign to undermine voter confidence.”
“Colorado leads the nation in election security and accessibility,” Griswold said. “I look forward to the lawsuit’s quick dismissal.”
United Sovereign Americans’ 48-page lawsuit, which repeatedly misspells Griswold’s name, seeks a writ of mandamus – an extraordinarily rare order that judges at the district court level are barred by federal rule from issuing – to compel Colorado officials to take “preventative measures” to ensure the integrity of the 2024 election.
The group has filed similar lawsuits in a half-dozen states including Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas and Maryland, where the suit was dismissed by a district court judge in a decision later appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.
Claims of widespread fraud in recent U.S. elections have been debunked by elections officials, experts, media investigations, law enforcement and the courts.
Efforts by some conservative groups and Republican elections officials to “purge” voter rolls of inactive or allegedly ineligible voters have long been criticized by civil rights groups as a voter suppression tactic. Claims that large numbers of ineligible people are registered to vote have been fueled this year by far-right conspiracy theories alleging mass registrations of noncitizen voters.
Among the measures sought by United Sovereign Americans is an order requiring Colorado to “submit voter registration requests (and any existing registrations reasonably in question) to the Department of Homeland Security to verify the citizenship or immigration status of persons seeking registration to vote.”
It’s illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. A total of 16 U.S. cities, including San Francisco and the District of Columbia, allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. Noncitizen voting at any level is constitutionally prohibited in Colorado by an amendment approved by voters in 2020.
A nationwide 2017 survey of local elections officials by the Brennan Center for Justice found just 30 reports of suspected noncitizen voters out of more than 23 million ballots cast in the surveyed jurisdictions.
Ramey Johnson of Jefferson County and Michael Cahoon of Douglas County are named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit alongside United Sovereign Americans. Johnson is a former Lakewood City Council member and the 2024 Republican nominee for Colorado’s House District 30, a safe Democratic seat in Denver’s western suburbs.
The plaintiffs are represented by Bruce Castor, a Republican attorney who represented former President Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial, alongside Denver-based attorneys John Zakhem and Andrew Nickel.
Kim Monson, a Colorado-based conservative radio host and founder of a group called the Colorado 2024 Election Project, has promoted and solicited donations for United Sovereign Americans’ efforts in recent months. She issued a statement this week calling the group’s lawsuit a “bold, preemptive” step to ensure “legally valid” election results.
Monson says her project has raised about $100,000 in contributions so far, which helped fund the legal action and what she referred to as “step 2” – a further analysis of Colorado voter rolls by election denial group Omega4America. That group, which the Texas Tribune reported was initially funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, claims to expose fraud using “fractal technology.”
Fractals are an advanced mathematical concept with little relevance to the relatively simple database management tools necessary for maintaining or analyzing voter registration records, researchers at The Open Source Election Technology Institute, a California-based think tank, wrote last year.
“There is no complexity in the administration of election data that would necessarily benefit from the application of fractal concepts,” the OSET Institute’s Gregory Miller wrote.
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