Secretary Of State Concludes Investigation Into Douglas County Clerk, Says There Is No Current Threat To System

By Sara Wilson, Colorado Newsline

February 10, 2022

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office closed its investigation into a potential breach in Douglas County’s election system and concluded that there is no current threat to voting equipment security.

The investigation came in response to the discovery of a social media post of an email in which the county’s clerk and recorder, Republican Merlin Klotz, asserted that he made an image copy of the voting system before a trusted build update to voting machines. Secretary of State Jena Griswold asked for further information and issued an order for a response after Klotz failed to respond to her initial request.

“After receiving responses from Douglas County, my office is satisfied that there is no current threat to the county’s election system. We have concluded our investigation,” Griswold said in a Thursday statement.

Griswold’s office contacted the elections staff who had access to voting hardware and equipment, who confirmed that no images were made. Klotz does not have access to the voting equipment. Additionally, the county reviewed a year’s worth of access logs and reported that it did not find any instances of unauthorized access.

That investigation concluded that neither Klotz nor another unauthorized person had access to create images of the system.

In a written response to Griswold’s office, Klotz wrote that the original social media post that launched the investigation caused “confusion and concern that is ultimately unwarranted.”

“That post was taken out of context, cut and pasted from an informal private email that was never intended to be an exacting recitation of events. The email used inexact wording that was simply incorrect in a legal context. No one has made an illegal or unauthorized image of any Douglas County election data or hard drive information,” Klotz wrote, adding that only a standard data backup was created before the trusted build.

Klotz said the social media post was from someone he does not know. Ashe Epp, a Colorado-based election conspiracist, posted the text of an email Klotz sent to a constituent on her Telegram page in October 2021.

“While I had no input when a third party re-posted an email to a concerned voter on a social media website and attributed the posting to me, I do regret that I used the wrong terminology in trying to describe the backup process to the voter,” he wrote.

Klotz is currently a plaintiff along with Republican Elbert County Clerk and Recorder Dallas Schroeder and Republican state Rep. Ron Hanks in a lawsuit against Griswold that claims the election system software used in the state in 2020 was improperly certified, that Griswold’s office illegally destroyed election records and that Griswold did not have the authority to prevent an election audit last summer.

Schroeder is also under investigation for allegedly making an unauthorized copy of his county’s election system.

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