By Adam Edelman, NBC
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold was in a constant state of motion Tuesday night as she awaited the primary election results that would determine her opponent in her re-election contest this fall.
Moving through her downtown office building, Griswold, who ran unopposed for the Democratic Party’s renomination, checked in with her Rapid Response Election Security Cyber Unit, the group she created in 2020 to help fight election misinformation. She chatted up her cybersecurity squad, composed of members of her information technology team and computer scientists temporarily deployed by the Army and Air National Guards. And she watched the results from the Republican secretary of state primary come in fast — a benefit of the state’s vote-by-mail system in which previously processed votes are tabulated immediately after polls in the state close.
Would her November opponent be Tina Peters, a local election official indicted on charges that she directed a breach of voting machines — exactly the type of “insider threat” to election security Griswold has spent the last several years warning about and trying to guard against?
Within an hour of polls closing, former Jefferson County clerk Pam Anderson had been projected the winner, instead. Peters, almost immediately and without evidence, claimed fraud was responsible for her third-place finish.