The League of Women Voters of Boulder County is backing several measures that aim to protect election officials and the integrity of local voting, League President Elizabeth Crowe said last week.
“We have always been at the forefront of voter security advocacy and that will not change,” Crowe said during a Zoom session discussing proposed election law legislation.
The League threw its support behind SB22-153, which bulks up internal election security measures in Colorado. It received a lot of input from the League’s, Gaythia Weiss, a member of the LWV election security team, said.
“We worked with the bill sponsors and were able to add amendments in a way that improved it quite a bit,” Weiss said. She testified in favor of the bill, which is now in the Colorado House appropriations committee.
The bill clarifies and expands the authority of the Secretary of State in overseeing elections, establishes security requirements for voting equipment, requires that county clerks and certain staff receive training prior to conducting elections and creates a grant program to provide funding to local governments to meet the new security requirements, according to the bill’s fiscal note.
The bill also states that election officials are prohibited from “knowingly or reckless making, publishing, broadcasting, circulating any false statements for the purposes of promoting misinformation or disinformation related to the administration of elections.”
The bill includes penalties for anyone trying to halt a “whistleblower” from pointing out election violations, Weiss said.
Another bill — The Vote Without Fear Act -_also gained support from the LWV. The recently passed legislation prohibits a person from openly carrying a firearm within any polling locations or central county facility, or within 100 feet of a ballot drop box or any building in which a polling location or central county facility is located, during a vote county, according to the text of HB22-1086.
The League threw its support behind HB22-1273, which makes it unlawful to threaten or intimidate election officials in Colorado as well as SB22-133, which allows for security to be provided for certain election officials.
The League did not support HB22-1085, which would have required election officials to use paper ballots provided by accredited vendors that include special ballot fraud “countermeasures,” according to the bill’s fiscal note. The bill would have required $5.7 million to be appropriated to the Department of State to implement. The bill has since been killed, League members said.
