Ad Blocker Detected
Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.
Pam Anderson at her office in southeast Denver on May 10. (David Zalubowski/AP)
Pam Anderson, a former Jefferson County clerk, will win the Republican nomination for Colorado secretary of state, CNN projects.
She had received endorsements from current and former elected officials including three former secretaries of state. Anderson will now face Democratic incumbent Jena Griswold, who is unopposed in her primary.
Anderson defeated Mike O’Donnell, a non-profit leader, and Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk indicted on multiple felony counts and misdemeanor counts from an election security breach investigation.
The race had focused on former President Donald Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud. Colorado is a vote-by-mail state. Anderson defended the state’s process, and ran as a competent technocrat who could manage that process.
Peters, the Mesa County clerk, has parroted Trump’s falsehoods while becoming Colorado’s most prominent election denier. She faces criminal charges over her efforts to justify falsehoods about voting machines. She was seeking to become the latest in a line of election deniers nominated by Republicans for roles that would position them, if they win this fall, to take over their states’ election machinery in time for the 2024 presidential race.
Peters and her top deputy were indicted in March after an investigation by local authorities into a security breach that resulted in confidential voting machine logins, and forensic images of their hard drives, being published in a QAnon-affiliated Telegram channel in early August 2021. In May, after a lawsuit brought by Griswold, a district judge stripped Peters of her duties overseeing this year’s elections in Mesa County. She has pleaded not guilty.
