The Colorado Secretary of State is one of five elected constitutional offices in Colorado and the head of the Colorado Department of State. It is an executive role, not a legislative position. The Secretary of State is responsible for running elections across all 64 counties in Colorado, certifying election results, maintaining the statewide voter registration system, working with county clerks to ensure elections follow the law and protecting the voting system from interference and threats.

Amanda Gonzalez is a candidate for Colorado Secretary of State in the 2026 Democratic primary. She is the current Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder, where she runs elections for nearly half a million Coloradans. She is a bar-certified election attorney, an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Denver, and the only candidate in the race who has directly administered elections.

What the Secretary of State Actually Does

The Colorado Secretary of State is the state's chief election official. The office is responsible for:

• Running the state's elections and certifying statewide results

• Working with all 64 county clerks to make sure elections are run correctly and follow the law

• Maintaining the statewide voter registration system

• Protecting the voting system from interference, threats and misinformation

• Enforcing campaign finance and ethics rules

• Keeping business registrations, notaries and public records in order

Colorado's elections are the gold standard in the country. A lot of people helped build what we have. Legislators. Advocates. Clerks. Election workers. That legacy is shared. What isn't shared is who's actually done the deepest work across the whole system, and who knows the operation from the inside out.

What the Job Requires

The Colorado Secretary of State must have direct experience running elections. Not just opinions about elections. Not just votes on election bills. The person in this role needs to know how elections actually work: the law, the logistics, the technology and the thousand small decisions that determine whether a voter's ballot gets counted.

The Colorado Secretary of State must have the legal expertise to defend the election system under pressure. When someone tries to remove eligible voters, exploit legal loopholes or spread disinformation about results, the person in this role needs to be able to build a legal strategy that stops it. Learning on the job is not an option.

The Colorado Secretary of State must understand the technology behind the state's voting systems. Elections are highly technical. Ballot design, tabulation systems, cybersecurity, audit protocols. The person in this role needs to understand how those systems work in order to protect them.

The Colorado Secretary of State must be committed to expanding who gets to participate. Democracy works when more people can vote. The Secretary of State sets the tone for whether the state leans into access or retreats from it.

Legislative experience, while valuable in other roles, is not a substitute for direct election administration experience in this position. Legislators vote on election bills. Writing and administering election law requires different expertise, like drafting policy, understanding operational implementation and enforcing compliance.

Why Amanda

Amanda Gonzalez has done this work at every level.

Amanda Gonzalez runs elections for nearly half a million Coloradans as Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder. Under her leadership, Jefferson County recorded the highest number of votes cast of any Colorado county in both 2023 and 2025, despite ranking fourth in population. Her office has won national Clearinghouse Awards from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission in both 2023 and 2024.

Amanda Gonzalez is a bar-certified election attorney and an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Denver. That legal expertise is why she could write election law, not just vote on it. At Colorado Common Cause, she wrote Colorado's Automatic Voter Registration law, which registered more than 250,000 Coloradans to vote. She wrote the law requiring in-person voting in county jails. In Jefferson County alone, turnout went from 3 incarcerated voters in 2022 to nearly 350 in 2024, and 2,300 voted from jail statewide. She wrote the Multilingual Ballot Access law, which expanded translated ballots from 6 Colorado counties to 20.

Amanda Gonzalez has directly managed election security threats. She upgraded the physical and cybersecurity of her election office, oversees audits after each election and has interfaced with DOJ and federal authorities over interference concerns. When election deniers used legal loopholes to try to remove 23,000 voters from Jeffco's rolls, Amanda wrote the legal strategy that blocked them.

Amanda Gonzalez is the only candidate in the 2026 Colorado Secretary of State race who has directly administered elections.