Colorado's next Secretary of State will face threats to our elections from day one. Amanda Gonzalez has been facing them for years. And winning.

Amanda Gonzalez is a Democrat. She’s the only candidate for Colorado Secretary of State who has both run large-scale elections and helped draft the laws that made Colorado a national model for voting. As Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder, she runs elections for nearly half a million voters. She is a bar-certified election attorney and an Adjunct Professor of Election Law at the University of Denver. She is the only candidate who is a lawyer.

If elected, she would make history as Colorado's first Latina and first openly LGBTQ Secretary of State.

A lifelong commitment to democracy

Amanda's first memory of civic engagement was going lawn chair to lawn chair at the local park when she was in elementary school. As parents watched their kids at soccer and t-ball, she asked them to vote yes on a school bond measure to fund permanent classrooms at her school. She learned early that if you want a better community, you talk to your neighbors and you vote for it.

Since those early days in the park, her work in democracy has only grown. She's become one of the country's leading voices on elections, voting and redistricting, sought out by outlets like the Washington Post, TIME, The Boston Globe, CPR and more for her expertise in voting rights and making elections fair and accessible.

At every stage of her career, Amanda has focused on a simple question: does this system work for everyone, or just a few? She's trained volunteer attorneys in Colorado election law, built coalitions to expand ballot access and worked alongside county clerks, lawmakers and community members to design policies that bring more people into our democracy.

For Amanda, democracy isn't just about casting a ballot. It's about whether people can afford a home, earn a fair wage, get health care when they need it, feel safe in their communities and whether all of us get an equal say in shaping that future.

How Amanda helped build Colorado's election system

Amanda helped build Colorado's election system into what it is today. As an attorney, an advocate, and an expert, she's done the part of building that requires the deepest election knowledge: writing the laws themselves. Writing a bill is different from passing one. It requires knowing how elections actually work, where the system breaks down, and how to write language that holds up in court when it gets challenged. That's the same expertise she'll use to defend Colorado's elections from the next attack.

As Executive Director of Colorado Common Cause, Amanda worked alongside advocates, legislators and community members to write and pass legislation that expanded who can vote, how they vote and how their districts are drawn. As Jefferson County Clerk, she kept writing laws, informed by what she was seeing on the ground, running elections every day. Here is her record:

Colorado's anti-gerrymandering amendments (Amendments Y & Z, 2018). Amanda helped draft the constitutional amendments that created Colorado's independent redistricting commissions, ending partisan gerrymandering and putting map-drawing in the hands of regular people instead of politicians. Colorado voters passed both amendments.

Colorado's Automatic Voter Registration law (SB19-235). Amanda helped draft the AVR policy that became SB19-235, which automatically registers eligible Coloradans to vote when they interact with state agencies. In its first year, the law registered more than 250,000 new voters.

Accurate redistricting for incarcerated communities (HB20-1010). Amanda helped draft and pass the Colorado Accurate Residence for Redistricting Act, which counts incarcerated people as residents of their home communities rather than the prison location, ending a form of prison gerrymandering.

Multilingual ballot access (HB21-1011). Amanda helped draft legislation expanding translated ballots from 6 Colorado counties to 20. It created a statewide hotline connecting voters with translators during elections, so people can vote in their primary language.

Colorado's first-in-the-nation jail voting law (SB24-072). When Amanda became Clerk, she found that out of roughly 850 eligible voters in the Jefferson County jail, only three had voted in 2022. Having the right to vote and actually being able to cast your ballot are two fundamentally different things. Amanda worked with directly impacted people and community partners to draft and help pass SB24-072, which made Colorado the first state to require in-person voting in every county jail. On the first day of voting, one man told Amanda it was one of the top five experiences of his life. He said it made him feel like he mattered. Jefferson County jail went from 3 voters in 2022 to nearly 350 in 2024. Statewide, nearly 2,600 Coloradans voted from jail, an 823% increase.

Amanda wrote these policies as an attorney, an advocate, and an expert in how elections actually work. That combination is what made these laws effective. It's also what's needed to defend them from every attempt to tear them down. That's the job of the next Secretary of State.

What Amanda Gonzalez has done as Jefferson County Clerk & Recorder

Amanda oversees elections, motor vehicle services and public records for Jefferson County's nearly 600,000 residents. Here is what she's done in office:

• Jefferson County delivered the highest votes cast of any Colorado county in both 2023 and 2025, despite ranking fourth in the state by population. Amanda's office achieved record voter turnout while cutting costs by millions, expanding ballot access and protecting elections from attacks.

• Her office earned Election Assistance Commission (EAC) Clearinghouse Awards in both 2023 and 2024 for innovation and voter education.

• Amanda has interfaced with the Department of Justice and federal authorities over election interference concerns. She has protected the election workers who make the system run.

• When election deniers used legal loopholes to try to remove 23,000 voters from Jefferson County's rolls, Amanda stopped them. The voters stayed registered. That strategy was used to protect voters across Colorado

The Secretary of State’s role is not legislative, it’a about running elections. Amanda Gonzalez is already doing it.

When more people can vote, more people belong

Amanda has spent her career making sure the people who are most often left out of elections, of government, of the systems that are supposed to serve them, get included. That's why she wrote laws expanding ballot access, fought for multilingual voting, and brought vote centers into jails. She believes that when more people can vote, more people belong.

Making government work for business owners too

The Secretary of State also oversees Colorado's business and licensing operations. Amanda ran a small business in Colorado, where she doubled profits while increasing staff diversity and creating her industry's first philanthropic program. She knows what it's like to navigate government systems as a business owner, and she'll make them work better.

Recognition

Amanda's work has earned recognition from the Colorado Hispanic Bar Association as an outstanding young attorney, the Colorado LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce as a "40 Under 40" honoree, the Denver Business Journal's "40 Under 40" for her leadership and NY Mag as a "Youngish" Democrat to watch.

"Thanks to great Democratic leaders like Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder, Amanda Gonzalez, and Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, we have automatic voter registration in Colorado." — Kathryn Wallace, Jefferson County Democratic Party Chair

Off Hours

Amanda calls Jefferson County home. When she's not running elections or working on policy, you can usually find her scouring the Front Range with friends for Colorado's best wine, tacos, donuts or dumplings, or at home cuddling with her senior rescue dog, Charlie.

She brings her whole self to this work because she believes democracy belongs to all of us, or it doesn't work at all.

You get a star if you read this far. Still looking for more? Find answers to questions Amanda frequently gets from voters.