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Colorado’s current secretary of state, Jena Griswold, and former Republican secretary of state, Wayne Williams, should be getting accolades for putting aside partisan differences during an election year for the good of the nation and working together to combat the insidious election conspiracy theories.
Instead, they were both attacked.
That is the political climate we live in, but everyday Coloradans know better than to be swayed by partisan players intent on stirring up animosity.
The Griswold and Williams television ad is important, and anyone saying otherwise either doesn’t like the underlying message – Colorado’s elections are safe and secure, and Trump is a raving lunatic for spreading the Big Lie – or doesn’t know that Williams is 100% in the corner of the Republican secretary of state candidate, Pam Anderson, who will face Griswold in November.
The ad, which is running on local TV stations, calls for Coloradans to be skeptical of election conspiracies.
“One thing we both know is that Colorado’s elections are safe and secure,” Wayne Williams says.
“That’s right, Wayne, but voters should be alert to election disinformation,” Griswold responds.
Griswold was accused of using state funds for a political campaign ad.
Williams was accused of betraying his party by participating in the ad only to promote his campaign for mayor of Colorado Springs.
The ads cost about $1 million and were paid for using federal funds intended to combat election fraud lies.
We are never going to recover as a divided nation unless more politicians start acting like Williams and Griswold.
We do not want to sound as if the two are perfect. These are not political saints we are talking about, but bitter rivals who set aside animosity that has been building since they faced one another in 2018 to send an important message. (We endorsed Williams in that election and Griswold won.)
Williams has not held back his criticism of Griswold this year, writing in an op-ed in the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel that Griswold used state resources to back federal legislation that would have interfered with Colorado’s signature verification process for mail ballots, a key component of our state’s election integrity.
Williams concluded by endorsing Pam Anderson in the Republican primary election: “Pam Anderson has a proven track record of fighting for election integrity. She helped improved (sic) Colorado’s signature verification – and she supported new rules requiring paper ballots for voters in Colorado.”
Griswold, meanwhile, is running a disingenuous campaign accusing Anderson of being an election denier, something that could not be further from the truth. Anderson has held no punches going after Republicans spreading lies about election fraud.
Many of the attacks on Griswold and Williams are coming from people who don’t like the idea of turning down the temperature in this nation and returning to politics that debate actual nuanced policy issues.
Coloradans will have a tough choice in November between Griswold and Anderson. We agree with the Aurora Sentinal’s editorial that in an ideal world, the two opponents, Griswold and Anderson, would have appeared in the ad together. Can you imagine what a powerful, unifying message that would have sent? But shy of that, we are glad Coloradans are getting a bipartisan message opposing the Big Lie.
We cannot forget that in the Republican primary for secretary of state, a woman indicted for multiple felonies, who was caught on camera attempting to kick a police officer and who has long tried to convince people that Colorado’s 2020 elections were stolen by an election company’s software program, received 180,000 votes.
Any effort to bring those voters back to reality should be lauded, not attacked.
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