{"id":40776,"date":"2022-05-05T17:56:45","date_gmt":"2022-05-05T23:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/election-system-hard-drive-copies-turned-over-to-colorado-secretary-of-state\/"},"modified":"2022-05-05T23:56:45","modified_gmt":"2022-05-05T23:56:45","slug":"election-system-hard-drive-copies-turned-over-to-colorado-secretary-of-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/election-system-hard-drive-copies-turned-over-to-colorado-secretary-of-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Election-system hard drive copies turned over to Colorado secretary of state"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Colorado
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold speaks during a news conference about the the state\u2019s efforts to protect the process of casting a vote on Oct. 15, 2020, in downtown Denver. (David Zalubowski\/Associated Press file)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The Elbert County clerk on Wednesday, in compliance with a court order, delivered to the Colorado secretary of state election-related hard drives and other material the secretary demanded.<\/p>\n

The hard drives contain full copies, or \u201cforensic images,\u201d of Elbert County election system hard drives.<\/p>\n

Republican Clerk Dallas Schroeder said in court documents that before a state-led election system software update in August 2021, he made the images on an external hard drive to preserve records of the 2020 election, which he claimed the update, known as a \u201ctrusted build,\u201d erased. A week later he made a second copy from the first copy. One of the copied hard drives was stored at his office in Kiowa, and the other was stored in an undisclosed location with an unnamed \u201cprivate attorney.\u201d<\/p>\n

Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, in January opened an investigation<\/a> into Schroeder\u2019s activities as a potential security breach after learning that Schroeder disclosed in a court document in a different case that he had copied information from the hard drives of Elbert\u2019s Dominion Voting Systems machines.<\/p>\n

She issued two orders seeking answers from Schroeder concerning the nature of his activities and the security of sensitive election information. The order said that Schroeder\u2019s copies were \u201cunauthorized\u201d and the investigation was meant to determine if he had violated state election rules.<\/p>\n

She deemed Schroeder\u2019s response incomplete, in part because he refused to name the private attorney who was in possession of one of the external hard drives, and in February, Griswold sued Schroeder<\/a> in Elbert County District Court to compel him to respond to her orders.<\/p>\n

On Friday, the judge, Gary Kramer, ruled in Griswold\u2019s favor and said Schroeder had until 10 p.m. Wednesday to comply with Griswold\u2019s orders.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Griswold confirmed that her office received material from Schroeder in response to the order, including hard drive copies, the identity of the private attorney, a chain-of-custody log for each hard drive copy and answers to questions to which Griswold sought answers in the January orders.<\/p>\n

Kramer ruled that this material should be \u201csuppressed,\u201d and it is not open to public inspection.<\/p>\n

\u201cClerk Schroeder has submitted the materials as required by the Court\u2019s Order,\u201d spokesperson Annie Orloff said in a statement. \u201cThe Secretary of State\u2019s Office is reviewing the information and is in possession of the unauthorized copies made by Clerk Schroeder of Elbert County\u2019s election equipment hard drives. At this time, all information that has been disclosed is under seal as ordered by the court.\u201d<\/p>\n

Schroeder was one of two county clerks named as plaintiffs in a lawsuit <\/a>against Griswold filed by Republican state Rep. Ron Hanks, an election denier who is running for U.S. Senate this year. The lawsuit claimed that election system software used in Colorado\u2019s 64 counties in 2020 was improperly certified, that the Secretary of State\u2019s Office illegally destroyed election records and that Griswold exceeded her authority when in the summer she adopted emergency rules to prevent the kind of election audit then occurring in Arizona, which she deemed illegitimate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Griswold has also confronted Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Republican candidate for secretary of state who questions the reliability of elections, over Peters\u2019 alleged role in an election security breach in her Grand Junction office. The secretary is suing to bar Peters<\/a> from overseeing 2022 election.<\/p>\n

Peters was indicted by a grand jury<\/a> on multiple felony counts in a case that concerns the election security breach.<\/p>\n

Claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent or compromised have been debunked by experts<\/a>, courts <\/a>and election officials<\/a> from both parties.<\/p>\n

To read more stories from Colorado Newsline, visit www.coloradonewsline.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

clerk ordered to turn over materials in connection with potential security breach<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[133,266,28,1621],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-40776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-courts","tag-election","tag-headlines","tag-voting"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40776\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40776"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=40776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}