Grand County clerk and Colorado’s secretary of state are the keys to fair and free elections, and the tone of both Democratic candidates in their remarks, as reported in the newspaper, was on target. Playing by the rules in the process is the antidote to election deniers. Local and state elections like these are where the battle for democracy is taking place all over the country.

Colorado, a nearly solid blue state, has a nationally known secretary of state, Jena Griswold, a Democrat who has carried out the spirit and intent of a GOP constructed mail-in voting system that has layers of bipartisan eyes on the process to ensure its integrity. The Democratic party candidate for Grand County Clerk, Abby Loberg, is a retired civics teacher and long-time resident of the county. She does not need a refresher course on what democracy is about and why it should be honored, respected and preserved. She is no party hack.

The real danger to democracy is electing someone to that office who is so partisan they cannot be trusted to play it fair and square. The attempt to seize voting machines so only one party has access to them, throw out legally cast ballots, consider all mail-in votes to be fraudulent, and make it inconvenient for people to vote were nationwide tactics used by the Trump-dominated GOP in 2020 that relied on the “stop the steal” slogan to give steam to its agenda of one-party control of the voting process.

Abby Loberg’s GOP opponent’s position on whether the 2020 election was stolen is not known, but the GOP candidate is known to be very partisan. She needs to be challenged to reveal her views regarding whether she is part of the “stop the steal” believers and how she would administer elections differently if she believes it.

Felicia Muftic, Fraser