Latest news with #JenaGriswold
Toronto Sun
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Toronto Sun
Man who blamed exposure to far-right content gets 3 years for threatening election officials
Published May 29, 2025 • 2 minute read FILE - Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold speaks in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, Feb. 8, 2024, in Washington. Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP DENVER (AP) — A man who blamed exposure to far-right extremist content for motivating his online threats to kill Democratic election officials Colorado and Arizona was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Teak Ty Brockbank pleaded guilty in October to making threats between September 2021 and August 2022 against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is now governor. He also threatened a Colorado judge and federal agents. Federal prosecutors sought three years in prison for Brockbank. He asked for leniency, saying he made the posts when he was drinking heavily, socially isolated and spending his evenings consuming conspiracy theories online. His attorney described Brockbank as a 'keyboard warrior' with no intent to carry out the threats. Brockbank spent time on social media sites like Gab and Rumble, the alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing and promoting far-right extremism. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The sites delivered 'the message that the country was under attack and that patriotic Americans had a duty to rise up and act,' said Brockbank attorney Tom Ward. Ward said Brockbank was drawn to the QAnon conspiracy theory and noted in a court filing that Michael Flynn and Roger Stone were prominent on Rumble. Brockbank posted online that Colorado's top election official should 'Hang by the neck' and her former counterpart in Arizona should also be put to death. Prosecutors said in a court filing that a prison sentence was warranted in part to deter others from threatening election officials. 'Threats to elections workers across the country are an ongoing and very serious problem,' wrote Jonathan Jacobsen, a Washington-based trial attorney for the Justice Department's public integrity section. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Under the Biden administration, the department launched a task force in 2021 to combat the rise of threats targeting election officials. Brockbank's conviction in the fall was one of over a dozen convictions won by the unit. At the time, the longest sentences handed down was 3.5 years in prison in two separate cases involving election officials in Arizona. In one case, a man who advocated for 'a mass shooting of poll workers,' posted threatening statements in November 2022 about two Maricopa County officials and their children, prosecutors said. In the other, a Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to sending a bomb threat in February 2021 to an election official in the Arizona Secretary of State's office. Brockbank, who has been in custody since his arrest in August 2024, asked to be sentenced to time served plus three years supervised release and possibly six months in home detention or a halfway house. Prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges against Brockbank for having firearms he was barred from possessing because of a previous conviction or for online threats he made later. One such threat was against Griswold last year for her role in helping the prosecution of former Colorado clerk, Tina Peters. Prosecutors say he also threatened judges on the Colorado Supreme Court after they removed Donald Trump from the state's ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court later restored Trump's name to the ballot. Toronto & GTA Columnists Toronto Maple Leafs Columnists World
Toronto Star
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Toronto Star
Man who blamed exposure to far-right content gets 3 years for threatening election officials
DENVER (AP) — A man who blamed exposure to far-right extremist content for motivating his online threats to kill Democratic election officials Colorado and Arizona was sentenced Thursday to three years in prison. Teak Ty Brockbank pleaded guilty in October to making threats between September 2021 and August 2022 against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who is now governor. He also threatened a Colorado judge and federal agents.
Associated Press
29-05-2025
- General
- Associated Press
Colorado man who threatened election officials asks for leniency in sentencing
DENVER (AP) — Teak Ty Brockbank posted online that Colorado's top election official should be executed and her former counterpart in Arizona should also be killed. But Brockbank, who faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced Thursday for making online threats, is asking for leniency. He says he made those posts when he was drinking heavily and socially isolated, spending his evenings consuming conspiracy theories online. Brockbank pleaded guilty in October to one count of transmitting interstate threats between September 2021 and August 2022 against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold and former Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, now the state's governor, as well as against a Colorado state judge and federal law enforcement agents. Under a plea deal, prosecutors agreed not to pursue charges against him for having firearms he was barred from possessing because of a previous conviction or for online threats he made later. One such threat was against Griswold last year for her role in helping the prosecution of former Colorado clerk, Tina Peters. They also say he threatened judges on the Colorado Supreme Court after they removed Donald Trump from the state's ballot. The U.S. Supreme Court later restored Trump's name to the ballot. Brockbank, who was has been behind bars since he was arrested in August 2024, is asking to be sentenced to the time he has already served plus three years of supervised release and possibly six months in home detention or in a halfway house. That's less than is recommended by federal sentencing guidelines but Brockbank's lawyer, Tom Ward, said that sentence would allow him to get unspecified treatment. In a court filing in support of the request, Ward said Brockbank was a 'keyboard warrior' with no intent of carrying out his threats. Brockbank spent time on social media sites like Gab and Rumble, the alternative video-sharing platform that has been criticized for allowing and sometimes promoting far-right extremism. Ward said Rumble and Gab repeatedly delivered 'the message that the country was under attack and that patriotic Americans had a duty to rise up and act,' he said. 'His engagement with extremist content online was driven not by a malicious character, but by a misplaced desire for belonging and a tendency to not question others' underlying motives,' Ward wrote. The filing did not specify which ideas Brockbank was drawn to but it noted that Michael Flynn and Roger Stone were prominent on Rumble. Prosecutors want U.S. District Judge S. Kato Crews to sentence Brockbank to three years in prison, in part to deter others from threatening election officials. 'Threats to elections workers across the country are an ongoing and very serious problem,' wrote Jonathan Jacobsen, a Washington-based trial attorney for the Justice Department's public integrity section. Under the Biden administration, the department launched a task force in 2021 to combat the rise of threats targeting election officials. Brockbank's conviction in the fall was one of over a dozen convictions won by the unit. At the time, the longest sentences handed down was 3.5 years in prison in two separate cases involving election officials in Arizona. In one case, a man who advocated for 'a mass shooting of poll workers,' posted threatening statements in November 2022 about two Maricopa County officials and their children, prosecutors said. In the other, a Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to sending a bomb threat in February 2021 to an election official in the Arizona Secretary of State's office.
Associated Press
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Associated Press
Trump order targets barcodes on ballots. They've long been a source of misinformation
ATLANTA (AP) — President Donald Trump's executive order seeking to overhaul how U.S. elections are run includes a somewhat obscure reference to the way votes are counted. Voting equipment, it says, should not use ballots that include 'a barcode or quick-response code.' Those few technical words could have a big impact. Voting machines that give all voters a ballot with one of those codes are used in hundreds of counties across 19 states. Three of them -- Georgia, South Carolina and Delaware -- use the machines statewide. Some computer scientists, Democrats and left-leaning election activists have raised concerns about their use, but those pushing conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election have been the loudest, claiming without evidence that manipulation has already occurred. Trump, in justifying the move, said in the order that his intention was 'to protect election integrity.' Even some election officials who have vouched for the accuracy of systems that use coded ballots have said it's time to move on because too many voters don't trust them. Colorado's secretary of state, Democrat Jena Griswold, decided in 2019 to stop using ballots with QR codes, saying at the time that voters 'should have the utmost confidence that their vote will count.' Amanda Gonzalez, the elections clerk in Colorado's Jefferson County, doesn't support Trump's order but believes Colorado's decision was a worthwhile step. 'We can just eliminate confusion,' Gonzalez said. 'At the end of the day, that's what I want -- elections that are free, fair, transparent.' Target for misinformation Whether voting by mail or in person, millions of voters across the country mark their selections by using a pen to fill in ovals on paper ballots. Those ballots are then fed through a tabulating machine to tally the votes and can be retrieved later if a recount is needed. In other places, people voting in person use a touch-screen machine to mark their choices and then get a paper record of their votes that includes a barcode or QR code. A tabulator scans the code to tally the vote. Election officials who use that equipment say it's secure and that they routinely perform tests to ensure the results match the votes on the paper records, which they retain. The coded ballots have nevertheless become a target of election conspiracy theories. 'I think the problem is super exaggerated,' said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice. 'I understand why it can appeal to certain parts of the public who don't understand the way this works, but I think it's being used to try to question certain election results in the past.' Those pushing conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election have latched onto a long-running legal battle over Georgia's voting system. In that case, a University of Michigan computer scientist testified that an attacker could tamper with the QR codes to change voter selections and install malware on the machines. The testimony from J. Alex Halderman has been used to amplify Trump's false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, even though there is no evidence that any of the weaknesses he found were exploited. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, has defended the state's voting system as secure. In March, the judge who presided over Halderman's testimony declined to block the use of Georgia's voting equipment but said the case had 'identified substantial concerns about the administration, maintenance and security of Georgia's electronic in-person voting system.' Can the executive order ban coded ballots? Trump's election executive order is being challenged in multiple lawsuits. One has resulted in a preliminary injunction against a provision that sought to require proof of citizenship when people register to vote. The section banning ballots that use QR or barcodes relies on a Trump directive to a federal agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, which sets voluntary guidelines for voting systems. Not all states follow them. Some of the lawsuits say Trump doesn't have the authority to direct the commission because it was established by Congress as an independent agency. While the courts sort that out, the commission's guidelines say ballots using barcodes or QR codes should include a printed list of the voters' selections so they can be checked. Trump's order exempts voting equipment used by voters with disabilities, but it promises no federal money to help states and counties shift away from systems using QR or barcodes. 'In the long run, it would be nice if vendors moved away from encoding, but there's already evidence of them doing that,' said Pamela Smith, president of the group Verified Voting. Counties in limbo Kim Dennison, election coordinator of Benton County, Arkansas, estimated that updating the county's voting system would cost around $400,000 and take up to a year. Dennison said she has used equipment that relies on coded ballots since she started her job 15 years ago and has never found an inaccurate result during postelection testing. 'I fully and completely trust the equipment is doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing and not falsifying reports,' she said. 'You cannot change a vote once it's been cast.' In Pennsylvania's Luzerne County, voting machines that produce a QR code will be used in this year's primary. But officials expect a manufacturer's update later this year to remove the code before the November elections. County Manager Romilda Crocamo said officials had not received any complaints from voters about QR codes but decided to make the change when Dominion Voting Systems offered the update. The nation's most populous county, Los Angeles, uses a system with a QR code that it developed over a decade and deployed in 2020 after passing a state testing and certification program. The county's chief election official, Dean Logan, said the system exceeded federal guidelines at the time and meets many of the standards outlined in the most recent ones approved in 2021. He said postelection audits have consistently confirmed its accuracy. Modifying or replacing it would be costly and take years, he said. The county's current voting equipment is valued at $140 million. 'Train Wreck' in Georgia? Perhaps nowhere has the issue been more contentious than Georgia, a presidential battleground. It uses the same QR code voting system across the state. Marilyn Marks, executive director of the Coalition for Good Governance, a lead plaintiff in the litigation over the system, said her group has not taken a position on Trump's executive order but said the federal Election Assistance Commission should stop certifying machines that use barcodes. The secretary of state said the voting system follows Georgia law, which requires federal certification at the time the system is bought. Nevertheless, the Republican-controlled legislature has voted to ban the use of QR codes but did not allocate any money to make the change — a cost estimated at $66 million. Republicans said they want to replace the system when the current contract expires in 2028, but their law is still scheduled to take effect next year. GOP state Rep. Victor Anderson said there is no realistic way to 'prevent the train wreck that's coming.' ___ Associated Press writer Christina A. Cassidy contributed to this report. ___ Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Secretary of State Jena Griswold will run for Colorado attorney general in 2026
Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold speaks at an Election Day press conference, Nov. 7, 2023, at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Aurora. The library is the site of Colorado's first tri-county ballot box, where voters from Denver, Arapahoe and Adams counties can drop off their ballots. (Lindsey Toomer/Colorado Newsline) Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold announced Monday that she will run for attorney general in 2026. 'I am running for Attorney General because Colorado needs a strong, proven leader in this critical moment,' Griswold said in a statement. 'I'll stand up to (President) Donald Trump to protect our rights and freedoms. I'll fight for working- and middle-class Coloradans, hold big corporations accountable, and safeguard our land, air, and water.' Griswold, a Democrat, was first elected secretary of state in 2018. She was reelected in 2022 and is term-limited. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is also term-limited and announced his run for governor in January. Griswold was initially expected to join the race for governor, but changed course in going for attorney general instead. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX As secretary of state, Griswold oversaw implementation of automatic voter registration and supported legislation criminalizing threats to election workers, fake elector schemes and compromising voting equipment. An outspoken Trump critic, Griswold supported the Colorado Supreme Court's decision to bar Trump from Colorado's primary election ballot under the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned. She was a defendant in the case filed by six Republican voters in Colorado. Her office also led an investigation into former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted for her role in a breach of her own election equipment in an attempt to prove the 2020 election was stolen. Griswold faced intense criticism after she disclosed in late October that a document posted to her office's website included a hidden but accessible worksheet containing passwords to election equipment in counties throughout the state. County clerks said that while election security in the state remained strong following the breach, many were upset that Griswold did not inform them about the breach until after the Colorado Republican Party learned about and announced it. Early supporters for Griswold's candidacy include U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, a Centennial Democrat, and Colorado House Majority Leader Monica Duran. Gail Schoettler, former Democratic lieutenant governor and treasurer of Colorado, will serve as Griswold's campaign chair. 'Secretary Griswold is the strong leader we need as Attorney General,' Schoettler said in a statement. 'As she always has, Jena will stand up to Donald Trump, MAGA extremists, and anyone who threatens the Colorado way of life. And as a woman, she'll protect reproductive healthcare.' The attorney general heads the Colorado Department of Law and oversees enforcement of consumer protection and antitrust laws, defends state laws in legal challenges, and advocates for law enforcement and community safety. Democratic Boulder District Attorney Michael Dougherty and Democratic former speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives Crisanta Duran are also running for attorney general. Conner Peddington is the only Republican candidate to file paperwork in the race so far. Primary elections to decide party nominees for state offices will be held in June 2026. SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
