That’s because the annual cost of covering abortion through Medicaid and another plan — projected at nearly $5.9 million — would be slightly more than offset by the reduced costs to cover births, according to a state fiscal analysis.

On Tuesday, the House Health and Human Services Committee passed Senate Bill 183 on a vote of 9-4. It already passed the Senate 22-12 earlier this month on a party-line vote. Co-sponsored by state Sens. Robert Rodriguez and Lindsey Daugherty, along with state Rep. Lorena García and House Speaker Julie McCluskie — all Democrats — the bill implements Amendment 79, which established a constitutional right to abortion in Colorado and was approved by 62% of voters in the November election.

The amendment also repealed an earlier provision in the state constitution that banned putting public funds toward abortion. The bill would now go a step further by requiring coverage of abortion care for Medicaid patients and Child Health Plan Plus program recipients, using state funding.

Public employee insurance plans would also have to cover the services, and the bill would prohibit state and local governments from blocking the right to an abortion. The legislation would take effect at the start of 2026.

“To further reduce federal interference, our legislation reduces the state’s reliance on federal reimbursement for reproductive health care,” Garcia said in a statement. “This bill upholds the will of the voters to ensure your fundamental right to access life-saving abortion care is never ripped away.”

Before the November election, opponents of Amendment 79 criticized state analysts’ conclusion in the Blue Book voter guide that its passage would have no fiscal impact. But the analysts wrote that any costs would depend on legislators’ future decisions since the amendment, on its own, didn’t authorize coverage of abortion services.

What fiscal analysts say

Now that SB-183 would require that public funding, the financial impact is coming into view.

In the state’s 2026-27 fiscal year, the first full year of public funding, the fiscal impact note for the bill projects that costs for abortion services will reach $5.9 million — and savings from terminated pregnancies are projected at $6.4 million.

The cited reasoning: Births covered by Medicaid incur higher expenses at delivery compared to the cost of abortion services.

The fiscal note estimates that the bill would ultimately cut costs for the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which oversees Medicaid, by around $286,000 in the 2025-26 fiscal year, which begins July 1, and about $573,000 in the next fiscal year.

But because abortion services would have to be paid for using state money, the bill would shift more spending to the general fund.

In the coming fiscal year, appropriations to the general fund — a fund in the state’s budget used for Colorado programs — would jump by $1.5 million, while cash and federal funding for the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing will decrease by $1.8 million. Since public funding would take effect midway through that fiscal year, in January, both figures would roughly double for the 2026-27 fiscal year.

According to the fiscal note, to cover abortion services, costs would rise for both local governments and the state’s employee health insurance across all agencies. For state employees, analysts project that adding abortion coverage will cost $204,700 per year — and they make the assumption that there wouldn’t be savings from “averted births” since, without coverage, employees who want abortions would likely seek them on their own.

Debate over public funding

To Jack Teter, the regional director of government affairs at Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, the fiscal impact — and any potential savings — don’t address the bill’s importance. Instead, he emphasizes that certain insurance plans will finally cover abortion services.

Right now, that type of care isn’t covered by insurance plans for state and local government workers, and the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing reimburses abortion services only in limited cases, including when a pregnancy is the result of rape or incest or poses a risk of death to the mother.

“The premise that insurance coverage for abortion care is a societal good because it saves money on births doesn’t feel right to me,” Teter said. “Access to health care is good always.”

The legislation’s fiscal note projects that more than 333,000 women ages 15 to 44 will be enrolled in the Medicaid or Child Health Plan Plus programs in the coming year, and almost 1.7% of program members of childbearing age will seek abortion care annually.

It estimates that procedural abortions are reimbursed at about $1,300, and medication abortions at $800. For pregnancies that are carried to term, it puts the average reimbursement for labor and delivery at around $3,850.

But Brittany Vessely, the executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference, disagrees with those estimates. Her group was an outspoken opponent of Amendment 79.

“The fiscal note drastically underestimates the cost of abortion, especially late abortion,” she said. Vessely puts the average late-trimester abortion cost at $3,000.

“To say that this saves the state money because of a one-time payment — it’s abominable,” Vessely said. “We’re talking about the lives of children.”

Teter says the state designates these health care services with set reimbursement rates.

“Medicaid has reimbursement rates for every single service that’s covered,” he said. “A provider can’t be reimbursed more than the Medicaid reimbursement rate.”

If the measure comes to pass, Vessely said Colorado taxpayers will carry the financial brunt of paying for abortions — “against their conscience, in many cases,” she added.

Teter underlines that the state’s residents “have spoken” by passing the amendment with over 1.9 million votes in favor.

“Insurance plans are a safety net, and insurance coverage for abortion care is no different,” he said. “There’s never a scenario when any of us who are paying into an insurance pool are able to — or have the right to — pass judgment on what health care someone else might need.”

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The Colorado Supreme Court declined to weigh in on a ruling against the city on Thursday, and city spokesman Max D’Onofrio confirmed that a new prohibition measure recently referred to the April 1 ballot by the City Council is dead.

El Paso County District Judge Hilary Gurney had ruled Monday that Colorado Springs leaders violated the state constitution by attempting to pose their ballot question during an odd-year election. That is not permitted by Amendment 64, the 2012 ballot measure that legalized recreational sales statewide, which allows ballot measures to prohibit recreational sales only in even-year general elections.

She quickly put her ruling on hold while the city appealed its case to the state’s high court. When it declined to take up the case on Thursday, Gurney lifted her emergency stay and ordered the city to “take all actions necessary to ensure that the Referred Ballot Question does not appear on ballots to avoid disenfranchising and confusing the electorate.” Overseas and military ballots will be mailed starting on Tuesday.

The battle over what would appear on the city’s municipal election ballot April 1 began last month when a majority on the council adopted a ballot measure challenging voters’ decision in November to green-light recreational pot sales, with nearly 55% support.

Several members claimed voters may have been confused by the language in Question 300, and by a competing unsuccessful ballot measure that would have banned those sales.

Question 300 allows Colorado Springs’ nearly 90 medical marijuana shops to convert to recreational sales. The first sales in Colorado’s second-largest city are expected in April.

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Although voters enshrined abortion access in the state’s constitution last fall, some Coloradans still feel uneasy about the permanency of reproductive health care and gender-affirming care under President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration. With the Republican leader set to take office for the second time on Monday, several Front Range residents told The Denver Post that they feared potential new constraints — like the specter of a federal abortion ban that would override protections in the state.

So they’re preemptively taking matters into their own hands.

Trump comes into office after his stance on abortion has shifted over the years. He took credit for the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade — the U.S. Supreme Court decision that had legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 — which was felled by five conservative justices in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Trump nominated three of them.

Since then, he’s proclaimed abortion to be an issue for states to sort out individually. And in October, Trump said he would veto a federal abortion ban — although he could face pressure from some GOP lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who are in favor of moving forward with national restrictions.

Trump’s promises haven’t reassured many Coloradans.

“Our freedoms are never guaranteed,” said Alison Friedman Phillips, the director of programs, policy and advocacy at the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, which presses for gender, racial and economic equity. “In the changing federal context, we can understand why women are uncertain whether those rights will be protected.”

Michaela Ruppert, 32, is one of those women concerned about their reproductive rights. She’s known for a long time that she doesn’t want children.

“The potential of being forced to carry a child — that just is terrifying to me,” said Ruppert, who lives in Fort Collins. “That should not at all be something that the government should be deciding.”

So after conferring with a doctor, Ruppert plans to take a step beyond her current birth control method, an IUD inserted in the uterus, by scheduling a salpingectomy later this year. That is a surgery to remove her fallopian tubes.

For her, it’s a solution to her pregnancy fears.

Reproductive health care “feels like it still could be taken away from me, even in Colorado,” Ruppert said. “Knowing that there’s this procedure that I could get done does make me feel better.”

After the Nov. 5 election, Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains saw a 119% increase in appointments for intrauterine devices, or IUDs, and a 54% increase for birth control arm implants — two of the most effective forms of contraception, president and CEO Adrienne Mansanares said.

“What we saw was a community-wide response to the election and a desire to ensure that people can plan their own pregnancies,” she added.

But that doesn’t mean Colorado residents don’t intend to start families. At Planned Parenthood, the demand for family planning services continues to jump statewide after falling during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Mansanares said.

However, amid anxieties about federal action, opponents of abortion rights aren’t convinced that Trump will make the issue a priority.

“The Trump administration has said time and time again throughout their campaign cycle that the Dobbs decision returns the question of abortion access back to the states,” said Brittany Vessely, the executive director of the Colorado Catholic Conference. “So there are no immediate plans to do anything to restrict abortion access on the federal level.”

Instead, she said, “there’s a lot of hyperbolic scare tactics going on.”

Vasectomies and morning-after pills

But women who have more questions than answers about the future of reproductive health care are making decisions now for themselves and their families.

Julia Marvin, 38, worries that contraception could be what’s limited next under Trump, now that abortion access has been curtailed in certain states after the fall of Roe v. Wade.

“What happens if different birth control methods are taken away?” she said.

Marvin and her 36-year-old husband have already made the decision against having kids, with climate change and other environmental factors dissuading him in particular. So after talking about it for over a year, she said, they plan to schedule him for a vasectomy, a sterilization procedure for men.

“Especially as we were getting closer to the election … we were starting to worry more about a Trump presidency,” said Marvin, a Thornton resident and a former state representative. “That sort of solidified things for us.”

Katy Moses, 49, plans to stock up on morning-after pills before Inauguration Day after discussing it with friends in a group text.

Moses had three kids before undergoing a tubal ligation, which is referred to colloquially as “getting your tubes tied.” But now, she’s fretting about safeguards for her teenage daughter.

At age 19, Moses had an abortion as a college freshman in Kansas, with the support of her then-boyfriend. “We were able to be safe. We were able to be dealt with in a medical facility that was clean,” said Moses, who lives in Evergreen.

However, with the ongoing politicization of women’s health issues, “it just feels like we’ve just stalled,” Moses said.

At Planned Parenthood, Mansanares says its inventory is fully stocked, and a patient can walk out of its pharmacies with a year’s supply of birth control. But she recommends speaking with a medical provider instead of amassing medication.

Larger concerns about health care access

Jamie Traeger, a transgender man, is concerned about future access to gender-affirming care, such as hormones and permanent sterilization, and the level of coverage by insurance. Traeger, 35, lives in Colorado Springs, and his husband is a military officer.

With Trump’s second term approaching, Traeger says some of his friends in the trans community are considering hysterectomies, which would surgically remove their uteruses. The reason: Sterilization is a more foolproof way to avoid pregnancy than IUDs or tubal ligation, Traeger said.

“For many of us, pregnancy is something that does not align with our goals for our body, our goals for our families,” he said. “There’s always a real urgency about permanent birth control.”

He had his own hysterectomy done in 2016 — although TRICARE, the military health care program, can make coverage of gender-affirming surgeries difficult, Traeger said.

Every week, he injects himself with testosterone as part of his hormone replacement therapy. If he was forced to stop, he said, then “that would be really dangerous for my health” by potentially affecting his bones.

For now, “the uncertainty of it all is just — it’s mind boggling,” Traeger said. So he and his husband are trying to stay in Colorado for its health care options, instead of pursuing other career opportunities around the country.

Some women, including those who plan to have children, remain uneasy about the prospect of a federal abortion ban.

Stephanie Lang, 36, wants a child. But before she and her husband, Andrew, make that choice, “we’re going to have to see what the political climate is,” she said. “We’re gonna have to see: Do our Colorado rights protect us in all these different situations?”

For her, it’s a heavier decision to make under Trump than it would have been under Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate who lost the presidential election.

When Lang decides to get pregnant, she aims to use genetic testing. If the results detect potential disabilities, then she intends to abort the pregnancy.

“You have no idea how much something like that impacts you for the rest of your life — not just in terms of all the extra labor you have to do, but all the finances as well,” said Lang, who lives in Denver. “It’s not just black and white when it comes to delivering a child.”

Being “in this weird limbo place”

Emily Burke-Weiss, 38, is trying to have another baby. She and her husband, who live in Denver, are already parenting a 2-year-old son.

Last November, at nine weeks pregnant, tragedy struck: Burke-Weiss found out during a scan that her fetus no longer had a heartbeat. Experiencing what’s known as a “missed miscarriage,” she either could wait to expel it naturally or could get an abortion.

Burke-Weiss opted to undergo a dilation and curettage, which is a surgical abortion. “I needed all the care that is banned in so many places,” she said.

If she ever found herself in the same position again, Burke-Weiss depicted herself as nervous to self-administer abortion pills, preferring the experienced hands of a doctor. Considering the possibility of a nationwide abortion ban, Burke-Weiss said: “I would be terrified if I was in this situation and lived in a country where I didn’t have access to it.”

For now, she’s waiting to see what happens over the next four years.

“I was pregnant when Roe was overturned, and I now feel like I’m trying to get pregnant in a time when we still don’t know the clear path of reproductive health,” Burke-Weiss said. “That puts me in this weird limbo place.”

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Last month, the bipartisan Upper Colorado and San Juan River Basins Endangered Fish Recovery Programs Reauthorization Act became law, extending protection for four threatened and endangered native fish species on the Western Slope. President Joe Biden signed it as part of the larger National Defense Authorization Act.

And over the weekend, the Democratic president signed the CONVEY Act, a Boebert-led bill that directs the Bureau of Land Management to sell to Mesa County a 31-acre parcel in Clifton for economic development.

“These were all bipartisan efforts that may not have grabbed the national spotlight, but they will make a major impact on the health of our state and that’s what is most important to me as a legislator,” Boebert, a Republican, wrote in a statement to The Denver Post.

The two-term congresswoman was sworn in Friday to represent Colorado’s eastern 4th Congressional District in the 119th Congress. That happened just over a year after she announced she wouldn’t stand for reelection in the 3rd District, which covers a huge swath of mountainous western Colorado, stretching from Craig to Cortez to Pueblo on the Front Range.

Boebert, 38, lost her luster in the district she had represented since 2021, making the wrong kinds of headlines for controversial statements and questionable behavior. She nearly lost her first reelection bid in 2022, despite the 3rd District being heavily Republican.

More unwanted coverage exploded nearly a year later, when Boebert was removed from a musical at Denver’s Buell Theatre after engaging in inappropriate behavior, including vaping and groping her date. Several prominent Republicans in the state went on the record withdrawing their support for her.

Boebert switched to the reddest district in the state — the 4th — at the end of 2023. She won a June primary and then the November election.

It took Boebert until nearly three years into her congressional tenure to see her first bill pass — the Pueblo Jobs Act — in December 2023. The law aims to create 1,000 jobs in Pueblo following the closure of the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot. Another bill to assign unique zip codes to communities in the country without one — including the 4th District communities of Lone Tree, Castle Pines and Severance — passed the House last month but did not get through the Senate.

But Boebert’s fish recovery bill — designed to protect the beleaguered humpback chub, bonytail, Colorado pikeminnow and razorback sucker — made it into law. For Melvin Baker, chairman of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the legislation was important.

“As stewards of the earth, the tribe supports the recovery of the endangered fish populations and the protection of the waterways to support the endangered fish,” he said.

With both chambers of Congress now controlled by Republicans, Boebert is sanguine about her ability to push through more legislation than she could under a politically divided Congress. But she said she’d look back wistfully at the part of Colorado that made her a household name in the first place.

“More than any one place, I will deeply miss representing the people of Colorado’s 3rd Congressional District as they supported me as a business owner and an activist before I’d ever run for office,” she said in the statement. “And while it may seem like a small thing, I will miss the gorgeous sunsets in Rifle.”

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After less than half a year representing the 4th Congressional District, Lopez will step aside as the second-shortest-serving member of Congress in state history — behind only William E. Burney, who filled a vacancy in Colorado’s then-3rd District from Nov. 5, 1940, to Jan. 3, 1941.

Lopez, a Republican who was sworn into Congress on July 8, said his congressional stint was an “honor and a pleasure,” if a bit discombobulated. The former mayor of Parker and a two-time Colorado gubernatorial hopeful rented 14 places on short-term leases to serve as home during his six months of service in Washington, D.C.

“I was like that foreign exchange student — I showed up in the middle of the year and missed the yearbook picture, but everybody liked me because they didn’t know that much about me,” he told The Denver Post last week, as he picked up pozole in Aurora for Christmas dinner with his wife of 37 years, Lisa.

Despite the truncated term, Lopez played a small but notable role in what became a convoluted electoral chess game centered on the political survival of U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, boosted GOP billing among Colorado’s congressional delegation and, ultimately, solidified Republican control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the upcoming Congress.

“The amount of coordination and the little bit of luck to get this to come together is something I will be teaching in class for a while,” Colorado State University political science professor Kyle Saunders said. “It’s a political story, it’s a campaign story and it’s a candidate story.”

Lopez, 60, won a special election in late June to fill out the term of Ken Buck, the longtime representative of the Eastern Plains district. Buck had abandoned his seat in March — nine months before his term was up. His retirement, announced in late 2023, set in motion a switch by Boebert, who was facing tough reelection prospects in her Western Slope district, to politically friendlier territory on the other side of the state.

The plan worked: Boebert won a hard-fought 4th Congressional District primary in a crowded Republican field and went on to win election easily in November. On the same night, Republican Jeff Hurd defeated his well-funded Democratic opponent, Adam Frisch, in the district Boebert had departed less than a year prior, and two years after Frisch nearly toppled her in the midterm election.

“It led to the Republicans holding both of these seats,” Saunders said of Boebert’s move.

Lopez, chosen by the 4th District’s central committee in late March to run in the special election, made it clear from the outset that he wouldn’t run in the June 25 primary against Boebert and nine other GOP hopefuls.

Boebert, in a statement, praised Lopez as having represented Colorado “in a principled manner” as she scraped her way to becoming his successor. The 4th District seat represents agricultural communities across a large expanse of land but also well-populated suburban Douglas County in south metro Denver.

“While his time in Congress may have been quick, Congressman Lopez absolutely made the most of it and gave a voice to Colorado’s 4th District that his constituents had been without for too long,” she said. “He consistently went above and beyond his duties, from speaking up for his district in internal meetings and on the House floor to being an eager collaborator on the issues we agreed on, like cutting wasteful government spending.”

The nation’s mounting debt was a chief concern for Lopez while he was in Congress. In his final vote as a congressman, he opposed a continuing resolution to fund the government, saying on Dec. 20 that he could not “accept a bill that does nothing to address our $36 trillion debt.”

In September, he introduced a bill requiring a tally of the national debt to be listed on ballots in elections for federal office.

The next month, he introduced a bill touting a “Red Card” system to allow private businesses to hire immigrant workers who enter and live in the U.S. to work “under strict government oversight.” The arrangement, which would be critical to the 4th District’s labor-hungry agricultural sector, would not provide those workers a path to citizenship.

At the time that concern about Venuezelan gang activity and arrests in Aurora was making national headlines in September, Lopez introduced a measure that called on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to detain and deport people in the country illegally with known gang affiliations.

None of his bills made it to the House floor for a vote, but Lopez said he was glad to have a voice in the Congress.

“I went in there knowing I was going to be there a short time,” he said. “It’s not often you get a chance to serve the people at that level.”

It wasn’t all work and grind in Washington. Lopez, during the interview, reminisced about the September day he was chosen MVP at the congressional flag football game against the Capitol Police.

As for the future and where politics might fit into it, Lopez said he was “keeping all my options open.”

“It’s been a great six months,” he said, “and maybe at some point I’ll write a book about it.”

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The person the Democrats were likely trying to protect was Secretary of State Jena Griswold, the state-wide elected official who oversees the elections division. Griswold, a Democrat, is subjected to false criticism from far-right extremists who have developed a vast conspiracy of election fraud and put her at the head of it.

She has received threats of violence and sexist attacks on her job performance that her male counterparts in Colorado’s constitutional offices have not faced. So we understand the knee-jerk desire to shield her from further unfair scrutiny.

But a performance audit is not about tracking down political ammunition. The audit reports are almost always boring recitations of best practices and good government policies. Rarely do they elicit headlines, let alone fuel campaign ads. These audits aren’t even financial audits looking for fraud or abuse.

There is ample evidence that a performance audit is needed for the Secretary of State’s office – far more evidence than is used for most other committee-initiated audits. We urge the legislative audit committee to reconsider. Sen. Lisa Frizell, the Republican chair of the Legislative Audit Committee, was right to request an audit of the elections division.

An external report extremely limited in scope, was released Monday. The investigation was prompted by the inadvertent release of ballot-counting machine passwords on the Secretary of State’s website before the November election.

We are relieved that the audit found nothing nefarious in the passwords. Instead, an employee was recklessly storing the passwords for election equipment on an inventory spreadsheet that was made public as part of the Secretary of State’s commitment to transparency. The employee typically published a .pdf version of the document with the passwords hidden and completely inaccessible. When that employee left, however, the office started publishing the spreadsheet in comma-separated format, and the hidden passwords were easily accessed by anyone who knew how to look for them by unhiding the passwords tab or sheet.

But Denver attorney Beth Doherty Quinn did find two policy violations in just this one instance – exactly the type of small infractions that a performance audit would be looking for, and exactly the type of good government changes that could prevent errors like this from occurring in the future.

Griswold committed to adopting Quinn’s seven recommendations to prevent future leaks of security information.

The elections division could clearly use some more scrutiny if two policy violations were found connected to just this one mistake.

Even more concerning than those two policy violations, however, are complaints from county clerks and recorders about the lack of communication from the Secretary of State’s office.

These complaints are not new and do not appear to be politically motivated, but rather stem from some sort of a systemic failure to support our county election officials.

The Denver Post has found email exchanges where clerks – both Democrats and Republicans – expressed frustration with the handling of the password scandal.

Frizell said this would be one of the focuses of an audit and Sen. Rod Pelton, also a Republican on the Audit Committee, said he has heard complaints from the clerks in the counties he represents.

“I just want to reiterate. I have 13 counties in my district and my county clerks have some distrust in our Secretary of State’s office,” Pelton said. “I think to strengthen that relationship, I think an audit is fully in line with this.”

Meanwhile, none of the Democrats who voted against the audit – Rep. Andrew Bosesenecker, Sen. Janet Buckner, Rep. William Lindstedt and Sen. Dafna Michaelson Jenet – explained their opposition other than to bring up the report from Quinn.

The last time the department was audited was in 2015, but the audit didn’t focus on the elections division.

The time for an audit is now.

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Updated Dec. 11, 2024 at 1:53 p.m. Due to an editor’s error, Sen. Julie Gonzales was listed as having voted against the audit. She was absent from the hearing and did not vote.

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Denver attorney Beth Doherty Quinn found that the office violated one policy regarding training individuals to ensure nonpublic information isn’t released. And it violated another policy on the review of data to ensure it doesn’t contain secure information before it’s publicly released.

Still, the 19-page report broadly absolved Secretary of State Jena Griswold and her staff of wrongdoing. Doherty Quinn wrote that “a series of inadvertent and unforeseen events led to the public disclosure” of the passwords on a spreadsheet posted to the Secretary of State’s website in June.

The passwords’ presence on a hidden worksheet in the file was not discovered by the state until late October, and elected county clerks weren’t informed for several days — sparking frustration and criticism from some election officials.

The “substantial weight of the evidence demonstrates that the BIOS passwords contained in the hidden worksheets posted on the Secretary of State website were posted mistakenly, unknowingly and unintentionally because the (Voting Systems) Team was unaware the hidden worksheets existed,” Doherty Quinn wrote.

She offered seven recommendations for Griswold’s office to adopt, including a prohibition on the use of hidden worksheets, the storage of all passwords in digital “password safes,” and the implementation of tighter scrutiny for which information is posted to the secretary of state’s website.

In a statement released with the report, Griswold said her office was “committed to implementing (the) recommendations to ensure a situation like this never occurs again.” Griswold previously said she regretted that the information was published.

Shortly after the report was released Monday morning, the Legislative Audit Committee rejected a request from its Republican chair, Rep. Lisa Frizell, to launch an audit in response to the leak. Frizell, a senator-elect who said she hadn’t seen the report issued that morning, said an audit was needed in part because of “fairly systematic and problematic issues” related to “communications with the clerks.”

The vote was tied, with all four of the committee’s Democrats voting against it and all four Republicans voting for it. Two of the Democrats noted the release of the Doherty Quinn’s report and its recommendations.

Doherty Quinn’s firm was hired by Griswold’s office last month to investigate the release of the passwords, which were discovered by a prominent election denier, Shawn Smith. Smith testified in early November that he learned of the passwords’ presence online on Oct. 24, the same day that Griswold’s office said it became aware of them.

The news was not announced until the Colorado Republican Party, led by another election denier, revealed the passwords’ publication on Oct. 29.

Smith testified that he was contacted by an attorney — before the leak was public knowledge — to fill out an affidavit about what he knew. It’s unclear how that attorney, John Case, learned of the leak or knew to contact Smith about it.

According to Westword, Smith told a group of Republicans in late November that he was tipped off about the passwords by Republican state Rep. Stephanie Luck and another Republican politician. Luck did not immediately return a message sent Monday morning. Case previously declined to answer questions.

“Difficult to anticipate” circumstances

The passwords on their own were not enough to access or alter election equipment, and a Denver judge ruled last month that there was no evidence that election systems were accessed after the password leak.

Staff from the Secretary of State’s Office removed the spreadsheet from its website and then traveled around the state to manually change any active passwords that were leaked.

“The investigator finds that this unique set of circumstances would have been difficult to anticipate,” Doherty Quinn wrote. “Further, on an organizational level, the Secretary of State/CDOS consistently took significant and appropriate measures to protect state information, including the BIOS passwords.”

The 2024 election results in Colorado have been certified.

According to Doherty Quinn’s report, the passwords were initially pasted into a separate, internal spreadsheet by a former member of the office’s voting systems team. That employee, who left in spring 2023, told Doherty Quinn that she kept the passwords in a hidden tab as “scratch paper” to help in her work.

When the employee left, she did not communicate the existence of the passwords in the file. Another version of the file had been published before, albeit in a PDF format that did not allow access to the hidden worksheets that included the passwords.

“Thus, (the former employee) had no expectation that the hidden worksheets would become public,” Doherty Quinn wrote.

But in June 2024, after the employee left, other staff decided to publish a more interactive version of the file that would be more user friendly. Those staff members were unaware of the passwords’ presence, according to the report, and were not aware of a software function that would’ve allowed them to check for hidden tabs.

Another employee, charged with reviewing material before it was published online, approved the file’s publication within a minute of it being requested. The secretary of state has “no policy, no directive and no written procedure for approving a web request,” the new report says, and that the employee received no additional training when he became an “authorized reviewer.”

Two other policy violations occurred but did not contribute to the passwords’ publication, Doherty Quinn wrote. They included insufficient password security for the original internal spreadsheet and a failure by employees to review and sign the office’s computer policies.

Fallout included complaints by clerks

Weeks of fallout following the disclosure included an unsuccessful lawsuit by the Libertarian Party of Colorado and the state GOP’s threat to launch a longshot recall effort for Griswold.

County clerks have vented frustration about how Griswold’s office handled the leak. Some officials, including the head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said they learned that passwords had been published online via the media.

In emails obtained by The Denver Post last month, two county clerks criticized Griswold’s office in communications to her staff. In a Nov. 4 email, Molly Fitzpatrick, the Boulder County clerk and a fellow Democrat, said that her sympathy for Griswold’s office over the leak “has turned into complete irritation and disdain at the lack of support we are getting to communicate to voters.”

Fitzpatrick said the “vacuum of information” about the passwords was baffling and fueled the narrative that Griswold “is running from this and that you all are leaving Clerks to defend this error.”

In a separate letter to Griswold that was also sent Nov. 4, Fremont County Clerk Justin Grantham, a Republican, accused Griswold of refusing to take accountability and of shifting blame to others in her office. Grantham said the situation exacerbated some people’s distrust in elections.

He wrote that he wanted an independent investigation and an apology, and he said that he could not “in good conscience trust you in this position and defend your office.”

In an email Monday, Grantham told The Post that he needed to review the new report before commenting. Matt Crane, the executive director of the clerks association, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Griswold told legislators in mid-November that her office was focused on discovering the scope of the leak before it informed clerks that passwords had been made available online. She said she regretted that clerks didn’t learn of the leak from her.

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The recount, already a certainty in the razor-thin race, was made official in an order from Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Monday night.

El Paso County must re-scan all ballots counted during the initial tabulation and the recount must be done by Dec. 6, according to the order.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

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He had been working on his dunk since he was 11, and it’s now a reliable piece of his arsenal. But dunking is hard in a game. So when you get a rare chance, you need to practice. And so he took three steps and launched to the basket, slamming the ball home, and hanging on just a little too long.

He swung out under the rim, landed at an odd angle, and collapsed. One of my principles as a parent is to let the coach and the trainer do their thing. Kids get hurt, it’s usually something minor, and there’s no need for helicopter parents to rush onto the court. But I spent years as a volunteer medic on a rural ambulance service, and I know the difference between a tweak and a real injury. This was bad, and I ran down.

Elias’s leg was horribly distorted, and his kneecap was dislocated — an extremely painful injury. He was breathless, in agony. My wife held his hand and helped him breathe. He blew most of the ligaments in his knee, damaged the patella, and was out for the season. When his surgeon walked out of the operating room, an hour later than planned, he looked pale. “I’d never seen an injury like that,” he said. He used a cadaver ligament to do the repair.

Over the winter Elias worked with a wonderful, creative and kind physical therapist from Minnesota, starting a few days after surgery. We quickly weaned him off oxycodone. In the icy Colorado winter, he used crutches for six weeks. I wrote the family of the ligament donor: “Your son helped Elias walk again.”

Elias said he saw new things in the world: the purple sunrise on the way to therapy, a club with Latino friends, cooking authentic food. All along, we talked about “first world problems,” like this athletic injury, as opposed to the real issues worldwide — Israel, Gaza, Haiti or Sudan. We talked about perspective. About privilege. Only 10 months out from his injury, on the night of the presidential election, Elias ate three slices of pizza and headed off to basketball practice.

My wife and I watched the results roll out with several friends who are political experts and climate activists, just like me. We looked on in shock as the dials ticked up toward a Harris defeat. I felt a physical sickness creep into my stomach. My daughter Willa, a philosophy major, called in despair. I tried to comfort her on the phone, still feeling the visceral pain of dropping her off at college three years ago, when I physically couldn’t let her go. I still can’t.

Things got worse as the night progressed. I couldn’t imagine the next four years. I worried about community, humanity and health; attacks on the Department of Education and vaccines; Ukraine; women suffering in medical purgatory; and deportation camps.

Elias has a Latino friend who is beloved by his peers. He’s autistic and cripplingly shy. After the election he said, “I’m going to get deported.” For him to be sent back to Honduras would be no different than sending Elias: He has no connections.

There will be real consequences for public lands, too, for greenhouse gas emissions, for the deficit nobody seems to care about but that will cripple Willa’s and Elias’ future. The head of the EPA doesn’t believe climate science.

When Elias came home from practice, alarmingly, he had a deep boxer’s cut under his eye. “An elbow. Took me by surprise.”

The wound was gaping, the kind that produces a scar. I washed my hands, dabbed the cut with betadine. Cut small pieces of tape and gently pulled the edges together as Elias closed his eyes. I pressed the tape down gently, ensuring the adhesive stuck. I put my hand on his head, as I have done since he was a newborn slick with amniotic fluid, and when he cried on discovering that gnomes were not real and when I hugged him on getting his first hit in Little League.

I thought of America’s constant pursuit of ideals that at the same time acknowledge our imperfections; not greatness, but a “more perfect union.” I thought of Elias’ friend, and remembered my Catholic friend’s reminder of how a society is measured, quoting Matthew: “For he who is least among you is the one who is great.”

Elias opened his eyes.

“You will be OK”

“And you will have a scar.”

Auden Schendler’s new book, “Terrible Beauty: Reckoning with Climate Complicity and Rediscovering Our Soul,” comes out this month. He lives in western Colorado with his family and is writing in his personal capacity.

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Political activists, observers and even supporters say the proposal suffered from the lack of a clear spending plan that could be explained to voters upfront. Without more detail, they said, big promises to deliver relief for struggling renters and to provide a leg up for people fighting to buy homes in a deeply unaffordable housing market didn’t carry sufficient weight.

Some of those observers also lamented that efforts to build a coalition backing the measure failed to secure support from several progressive organizations that could have mobilized the few thousand additional voters it needed to pass.

“This was winnable,” said Robin Kniech, a former Denver city councilwoman with a deep background in housing policy work, in an interview last week. “In trying to provide something for everyone, they failed to articulate any specific outcomes for anyone.”

All told, Ballot Issue 2R would have been the largest dedicated sales tax in city history — a 0.5% addition to the city’s rate that would have generated an estimated $100 million per year in revenue for the affordable housing cause. That money would have paid for investments in new mixed-income housing developments, preservation of existing affordable housing, rent subsidies, down payment assistance for homebuyers and more, according to the campaign.

Despite the scope of that ask, Kniech and others said the campaign still fell short on those cornerstone elements of winning campaigns.

Close election losses can sting the most. And Issue 2R suffered a very close loss: It fell short by just a shade over 1%, or 3,706 votes, in final unofficial results posted by the Denver Elections Division.

“The worst type of defeat is when you lose by 1%, because you’re going to say everything mattered,” said Deep Singh Badhesha, a Denver-based progressive political activist who supported 2R.

Maybe a few more well-placed yard signs could have made a difference, Badhesha said. Or perhaps one more key endorsement.

In the wake of the measure’s failure, thoughts in city hall are turning toward what comes next.

Johnston, in a statement to The Denver Post on Friday, emphasized that Issue 2R was not the only path to deliver on his promises to bring more affordable housing to the city that elected him mayor last year.

“We will continue to work around the clock to create innovative solutions to our housing challenges, partner with the state and federal governments, improve our own processes and reevaluate our programs to ensure they are as effective as possible,” Johnston said. “I look forward to sharing more on our path forward in the coming weeks.”

National debates may have played role

City Council members who backed Issue 2R are left to look at smaller, incremental moves the city can make to reduce the city’s severe and growing shortage of housing affordable to low- and middle-income residents. Those include ongoing discussions about how the city spends money from its existing Affordable Housing Fund and Homelessness Resolution Fund — and if that spending can be shifted to better meet the needs, members say.

In the meantime, some who co-sponsored the legislation referring 2R to the ballot this summer also lamented the lack of clarity around what it was meant to do.

The tax went from a big idea pitched by the mayor at a press conference in front of city hall to a record-setting sales tax increase on the ballot in the span of just four months. Had it passed, city housing officials were slated to prepare a detailed first-year spending plan that could be reviewed and voted on by the council in January.

“People have to be really familiar with what a sales tax is going to do and how it’s going to be administered,” said City Council president Amanda Sandoval, one of those co-sponsors. “As much work as we did, just the clarity of the plan was not there. (That’s) what I heard from my voters.”

Sandoval said she also encountered misinformation — something she traced to noise coming from the presidential campaign about immigration and other issues. Some voters, she said, told her they didn’t want to support a tax that would raise money to house more migrants and people who are homeless.

That perception created another barrier, she said — causing some to believe 2R was focused on those issues in Denver rather than on supporting multigenerational families and people like Sandoval’s own children, who are worried about their ability to afford homes in the city.

“The hurdles that were in front of us with the rhetoric from the presidential campaign, I don’t know how we could have done it differently,” she said.

Councilman Darrell Watson is no stranger to the finer points of city housing policy. He previously chaired the Denver Housing Stability Strategic Advisors board, a body organized to provide guidance on city housing policy and spending. He also pointed to the challenges of selling a sales tax increase at a time when economic uncertainty and the still-looming shadow of inflation colored many voters’ decisions, from the presidency on down — even in a place like deep-blue Denver.

“Folks are still worrying about their pocketbooks, but I think sales tax measures are always tough,” Watson said. “It was not as clear-cut a message as some of the other issues that were on the ballot.”

“Promise what you can deliver”

Denverites did pass another large sales tax increase this year. Ballot Issue 2Q, a new 0.34% sales tax designed to raise $70 million per year to shore up the finances of Denver Health, the city’s safety-net hospital, won support from 55.7% of voters. With its passage, Denver’s effective sales tax rate will increase to 9.15%.

The Denver Health tax campaign entered election season with a head of steam after months of stakeholder engagement and then council referral to the ballot. Denver Health CEO Donna Lynne, on election night, credited the measure’s early lead to its leaders being clear with voters about what the tax would pay for.

Denver Health representatives explained that the money would support focus areas that included emergency and trauma care, pediatric care, and addiction treatment and recovery.

“We have talked to voters directly in detail about Denver Health, and they understand our service. And I think that’s what’s making the difference,” Lynn told The Post after initial results rolled in.

From the time Johnston introduced the separate tax proposal that became Ballot Issue 2R, he pitched it as the critical funding source Denver needed to fill a projected affordable housing gap of 44,000 units over the next decade.

Kniech also saw this as a campaign strategy mistake. The housing shortage is so complex, she said, that voters already doubt the ability of government leaders to make a difference.

“Follow the Denver Health model — promise what you can deliver,” Kniech said. “There is no need to risk the public trust by overstating what one city can accomplish with one funding source.”

Badhesha, the political activist, pinpointed another weakness identified by other observers. Despite building a coalition of supporters that included many recognizable nonprofit organizations and affordable housing builders, 2R’s campaign didn’t receive endorsements from some grassroots groups.

To him, that hinted at potential missed opportunities to rally the extra 4,000 or so votes needed to pass it. Notably, 30,943 voters skipped the question on their ballot.

Badhesha pointed to two progressive organizations that he belongs to — the Denver chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and the Colorado Working Families Party — that supported other city measures this cycle but skipped 2R. There will always be a subset of voters who stand steadfastly against any new taxes, he said, which is why mobilizing progressive groups is critical.

For Councilwoman Diana Romero Campbell — another lifelong Denverite worried about how her adult children will be able to afford to stay in the city — 2R’s loss was painful but galvanizing.

“Clearly there is no silver bullet,” she said of the city’s affordable housing needs. “And it feels like this is our job. We have to figure it out.”

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