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A system update accidentally lifted protections on confidential records in Colorado, exposing dozens of voters’ personal information, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The limit that normally blocks access to confidential voter profiles was inadvertently disabled during an update to the Find My Voter Registration Tool, revealing the personal information for 59 voters who had requested confidentiality, the election office said.
The breach went unnoticed for roughly 10 days before officials discovered it, after which the election office said the update was immediately rolled back.
“My office takes the confidentiality of each and every voter’s data extremely seriously,” Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement. “I sincerely regret that this happened. My staff identified this issue, and we immediately fixed it and are continuing outreach to affected voters.”
The Secretary of State’s Office said it has contacted each affected voter and established additional guardrails to ensure that another breach does not occur. The department also plans to implement additional new automated and manual testing protocols to prevent future incidents.
This is not the first security incident involving the office under Griswold, who often calls Colorado’s election system among the best in the country and its mail-in voting the “gold standard.”
In 2024, the passwords for Colorado’s voting computers were visible online for months and Griswold’s office only changed the leaked passwords after the issue became public.
Voting machines used by county clerks were listed on a spreadsheet on the Colorado Secretary of State’s website by serial number, county, model and vendor. There was a hidden tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet that, when unhidden, showed one of two passwords needed to make changes to each computer.
A third-party investigation into how voting equipment passwords were posted online concluded that Griswold’s office failed to review documents before posting them online but that the mistake was “unintentional.”
“A series of inadvertent and unforeseen events led to the public disclosure of the BIOS Passwords,” the investigator, Baird Quinn, LLC, concluded.
“However, the failure to review the posted document to ensure that non-public information would not be disclosed violates a Colorado Information Security Policy on publicly accessible content issued by the Governor’s Office of Information and Technology,” the investigator added.
At the time, Griswold insisted that Colorado’s elections are safe and her office has “many layers of security.”
“I am regretful for this error. I am dedicated to making sure we address this matter fully and that mistakes of this nature never happen again,” she also said then.
Griswold, the Democratic nominee for attorney general and currently term-limited as secretary of state, is running against Republican Michael Allen. Phil Weiser, the current attorney general who is also term-limited, is seeking the governor’s seat against Republican Victor Marx, a Christian ministry leader and first-time candidate.
The exposure of confidential information occurred against the backdrop of Colorado, along with about two dozen states, filing a lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service to challenge a new rule that seeks to restrict the mailing of ballots to American citizens on an eligible voters list.
Colorado relies heavily on the mail-in ballot system. As do several states.
The U.S. Postal Service recently laid out how it would implement the order, but time is running short to impose major changes with some states beginning to send mail ballots to voters in just a few weeks.
A few days ago, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court had cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s executive order, which mandates the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to create those lists — to be given to states — and which bars the U.S. Postal Service from mailing ballots to people who are not on the lists of “enrolled” voters.
Griswold said Colorado is still on track to mail ballots to voters as planned in October.
The Associated Press and 9News contributed to this article.
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