Colorado Secretary of State Race 2026: Gonzalez vs Wiley From Douglas County

Your mail ballot arrives because a county clerk sent it under rules the Secretary of State writes. The two offices are on the same ballot this year, and so is Amendment 84, which would change what both of them do with the envelope you send back. Read the three together.

What the office does for you

CPR's guide puts it in one line: the Secretary of State manages Colorado's elections and business licensing. The state office sets the rules and the county clerks carry them out. The Blue Book describes the current system: every voter gets a mail ballot, the envelope signature is compared to the one on file, and a mismatch goes to two election judges of different parties and then to the voter to cure. In 2024, 92 percent of ballots cast in Colorado were mail ballots.

The business side matters here too. The Blue Book's fiscal note on Amendment 84 says the Department of State's costs are historically paid from fees it collects, and that business filing fees "may need to be raised" to cover the measure. The office that counts your ballot is also the one that collects the fee on your business filing.

Amanda Gonzalez, Democrat

Gonzalez is the Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder, elected in 2022, and before that the executive director of Colorado Common Cause. Her site describes her as a bar-certified election attorney and an adjunct professor of election law at the University of Denver, and says she is the only lawyer in the race. She lists the laws she worked on at Common Cause: the 2018 anti-gerrymandering amendments Y and Z, automatic voter registration (SB19-235), multilingual ballots (HB21-1011) and the in-jail voting law (SB24-072). As clerk she says she blocked an attempt to remove 23,000 voters from the rolls. She won the June primary over state Sen. Jessie Danielson, 530,299 votes to 293,351.

Her case is the current system. "Every ballot that we process is on paper and you can't hack paper," she told CPR in September. On one-day voting: "What happens if you get sick? What happens if your cat gets sick... You're just not heard in our election?" She calls her opponent's plan "a lot of new barriers to voting," and told CPR she would expand state support for smaller counties on communications and IT. Her endorsements page lists three county clerks (Denver, Saguache and Conejos) and no Douglas County officials or groups.

James Wiley, Republican

Wiley is 32, born in Colorado Springs, and by his own account spent 15 years in Kazakhstan before finishing high school in Pueblo and taking a management and marketing degree and an MBA from CSU Pueblo in 2017. He was executive director of the Libertarian Party of Colorado in 2024 and 2025, ran for the 3rd Congressional District as a Libertarian in 2024, and switched to the Republican Party at the end of 2025. "I do not want to be a Republican, but that's what's necessary now," he told Colorado Politics in January. He was unopposed in the June primary. His bio page lists Littleton as home.

His platform is a rebuild. His issues page calls for "one-day in-person voting, voter ID for one-citizen-one-vote, paper ballots without electronics, and no mail-ins except in rare cases," and says he would decertify all electronic voting machines by executive action on day one and replace them with hand counts. On the Kim Monson Show in July, per the Colorado Times Recorder, he said: "One of my first priorities is going to be with the voter rolls to begin to audit them, to begin to review them, and if possible, to delete them," with every eligible voter re-registering in person. "Universal mail-in voting, unfortunately, breaks apart communities," he told CPR. He is, CPR reports, a supporter of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, and his site lists the recount and BIOS-password lawsuits against Griswold that he says he directed through a group called Save Our Suffrage; CPR notes one was dismissed by a Denver District Court judge. On business, he wants automatic renewal of business registrations and a blockchain "Liberty Ledger" for public records.

His endorsements page lists three names: a "Teddy Collins, Candidate, Colorado Senate District" (the page gives no district number; a Teddy Collins is the Republican for Senate District 4 on the Douglas County ballot), state Rep. Ken DeGraaf of House District 22, and the Pikes Peak Firearms Coalition.

The other three

Sean Vadney, Libertarian, finished second in his party's primary and was placed on the ballot after the winner withdrew; CPR reports the Secretary of State's office first denied him a spot and the party won in court. He opposes mail voting and wants in-person voting with photo ID. Amanda Campbell of the American Constitution Party is on her sixth run for this office since 2010; she took 1.63 percent in Douglas County in 2018 and 0.59 percent in 2022. Celeste Landry of the Forward Party comes out of the League of Women Voters and runs on proportional representation.

What Douglas County's numbers say

Griswold lost this county twice while winning the state twice. In 2018 she took 40.05 percent here against Wayne Williams's 57.95, on a night the Republican for governor got 56.12 percent in the county. In 2022 she took 44.38 percent against Pam Anderson's 53.20, while the county split nearly even for governor, 49.43 Ganahl to 48.75 Polis. Anderson ran nearly four points ahead of her party's candidate for governor here.

That is the county's pattern for this office: it rewards a Republican the voters read as an election administrator. Wiley is not running as one. He is running against the system the county clerk uses every cycle, including the mail ballots that go out this week. Whether Douglas County gives him the 53 percent Anderson got, or something closer to what Victor Marx gets for governor, is the number we will report.

The Amendment 84 question

Amendment 84 would add the last four digits of a Social Security or Colorado ID number to every mail-ballot envelope, on top of the signature, and the Blue Book estimates county costs statewide of up to $2.5 million in the first year, about 45 percent reimbursed by the state. The Secretary of State would write the rules and run the outreach; Sheri Davis or Jim Oehler would run it at the county's drop boxes. We have not found a published position on 84 from either Gonzalez or Wiley. Their platforms point in opposite directions from it: hers defends signature verification as it stands, his would go well past 84 to in-person ID and almost no mail ballots at all. Ask both.

More: the clerk race, Amendment 84, every race and measure on your ballot and the November ballot guide. We do not endorse candidates. Campaigns can send corrections to hello@discoverdougco.com.