This is the first of a series that looks into Colorado’s biggest general election contests.

Once upon a time, the secretary of state was an elected office that got little attention, and people would be forgiven if they couldn’t identify who held it or what the position did.

Those days are long gone. Today, the office occupies the focal point of a debate over the credibility of America’s election system. Often, the officials who hold the position, or those who seek it, are compelled to take a side, either declaring that election results can’t be trusted or they’re completely error-free.

That would have been the case in Colorado, had a county clerk, who disputed the results of the last presidential election, won the Republican contest for the office.

Instead, the race features Jena Griswold, the incumbent Democrat, and former Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder Pam Anderson, who secured the GOP nomination.

Both of them, in fact, vigorously defend the integrity of Colorado’s election system.

Anderson’s position emanates from decades of service as an election officer. A seasoned election veteran with 17 years in public service, she started out as city clerk in Wheat Ridge and spent eight years as Jefferson County’s clerk and recorder, where she managed elections and other business for the state’s second largest county. After term limits ended her time as clerk and recorder, she became legislative co-chair and then, until late 2020, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association.

The past decade brought major changes to Colorado’s elections laws — vote by mail, risk-limiting audits, voting centers, tightened processes around petition gathering — and Anderson, who holds a master’s degree in public administration, has been a leading voice for many of these changes.

Anderson said she decided to run for secretary of state after seeing, at the state and local level, a parade of people who seek elected offices but who are more interested in partisan politics than in actual service.

She said that, during the primary campaign events attended by Republican candidates, people weren’t getting the complete picture about how elections work.

“They didn’t have anybody standing there telling them, ‘Hey, this is how this works. This is what we do,’” she said.

Anderson said she has a lot of faith in voters and their desire for a professionally run Secretary of State’s Office, a trend she saw throughout the summer, when voters told her they want someone who takes the partisan rhetoric down a notch.

“Coloradans are concerned about fairness and when you make it partisan or polarizing, it creates a real problem for perception on fairness,” she said, adding she sees fairness, not partisanship, as the proper philosophy and vision for the office.

She said work and mission of the agency must be viewed through the lens of professional experience, rather than a political one.

And that, Anderson said, is the difference between herself and Griswold, accusing the latter of elevating her profile through and for political reasons.

If elected, Anderson said she plans to be a spokesperson for the credibility of Colorado’s elections, as well as ably manage the Secretary of State’s Office, minus the partisan rancor that she believes now permeates the office.

Leadership is a challenge for the agency, Anderson added, noting that, under Griswold, the agency has gone through four deputy secretaries of state, multiple chiefs of staff, communications directors and legislative liaisons.

“It is about the mission and less about the politics. It’s certainly less about a particular candidate’s politics and their future political career,” she said.

It remains to be seen if the race serves as a referendum on how Griswold has run the Secretary of State’s Office. But the incumbent points to her record in arguing the voters should send her back to the office.

“I don’t think any secretary of state in Colorado’s history has served during both a global pandemic and than unprecedented attack on the right to vote, whether it’s through threats to election workers, insider threats, where a very small but concerning portion of election officials tried to prove the conspiracies and become security threats, to just all types of really unprecedented behavior.”

Griswold said that, under her term, “democracy not only survived, it thrived in the middle of the pandemic.”

To support her claim, she pointed to Colorado’s record of having the second-highest voter turnout in the nation and her “decisive” actions in Mesa County, in which she asked a judge to prohibit Tina Peters, the clerk and recorder, from overseeing elections.

Griswold, who is finishing her first term, was the first Democrat elected to that post in 60 years. Her experience includes practice in anti-corruption and business law. She also ran a small business, and served as director of then-gov. John Hickenlooper’s Washington, D.C., office.

A first-time candidate in 2018, Griswold, who holds a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania, held no experience running either state or local elections. She made missteps in her first year in office.

Just five months into her first term, she set up a highly publicized exploratory committee to examine a run for the U.S. Senate, which furthered criticisms in some circles that she is “politically ambitious and takes credit for the work done by her predecessors and county clerks — with whom she has had a rocky relationship — as a springboard to higher office,” according to a 2021 Colorado Politics profile.

A month earlier, Griswold’s office ran a news release, calling for a boycott of Alabama over the state’s abortion ban, raising concerns about her biases over abortion, an issue that has appeared on Colorado ballots through citizen initiatives more than a half-dozen times. Griswold also drew criticism for asking Planned Parenthood to edit the press release.

She managed the agency and ran elections during COVID-19, an extraordinary period that tested America’s ability to hold one of the rituals of its grand experiment in representative democracy. She tussled on social media with former President Donald Trump and became a prominent voice on the issue of election integrity, testifying before Congress on voting rights and misinformation.

Griswold also dealt with alleged illegal actions by Peters and Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder, who made copies of his county’s election hard drives, and also went after Democratic county clerks in Arapahoe and Pueblo counties who also were accused of illegal activities. Like other election officials elsewhere in the country, Griswold has faced threats, primarily online.

“I focused on delivering my promise to protect the right to vote and expand access to the ballot,” she said, adding her actions included expanding election drop boxes, guaranteeing access on tribal lands, and promoting automatic voter registration, which she claimed led to registration of more than 350,000 eligible Colorado voters from all political stripes.

Griswold also pointed to her efforts to reject “fake audits” and support legislation at the state Capitol, ranging from proposals making it a felony to compromise voting equipment and allow unauthorized access, protecting election workers from “doxxing” and prohibiting open carry of guns within 100 feet of a drop box or voting center. At the same time, she backed legislation to lower fees for registering a business with her office.

Griswold disputed claims that her office has experienced a high turnover rate, insisting there has been very little turnover among the civil servants who run elections, the business and licensing division, and the administrative division. She did not respond when asked why there has been such a high turnover among the agency’s leadership.

Embracing the tactic of guilt by association, Griswold accused Anderson of campaigning with “election deniers,” even though “I’m the first to say [that] Anderson is not an election denier. I’ve never said that.”