Jefferson County Clerk Amanda Gonzalez Joins 2026 Race for Secretary of State

“How do you make systemic change?”

That’s the question Amanda Gonzalez searched on Google while working at a residential treatment center for at-risk youth in California. No matter how much she helped the teens, Gonzalez realized that society was not designed to give them the support they needed. She wanted to fix that.

Her Google search led her to enroll in the University of Denver law school in 2008. As an attorney, Gonzalez shifted her focus to voting rights advocacy, determining that all other advocacy work cannot be successful unless the underlying system of democracy functions properly. She followed that philosophy all the way to public office: Today, she serves as the clerk and recorder for Jefferson County, a post she won in the 2022 election.

“I want democracy to work for all of us,” Gonzalez says. “When I realized I was the most qualified candidate to do that, I was like, ‘All right, Google, how do we run for office?'”

Now she’s setting her sights on a higher office. Gonzalez is running to be Colorado’s next secretary of state, launching her campaign for the 2026 election on Monday, January 6.

If Gonzalez is elected, the forty-year-old Democrat would be Colorado’s first Latina secretary of state. As a bisexual woman, she would also be the first open member of the LGBTQ community to hold the office.

“Right now in politics, people feel unheard. That indicates we need a new kind of leadership,” she says. “The first Latina, the first out person, that’s a new kind of leadership. That’s the future. Talking about a system that works for all of us isn’t academic for me. My people are some of the people who have historically been left out of our democracy.”

Before she was Jefferson County clerk, Gonzalez worked as executive director of the pro-democracy nonprofit Colorado Common Cause; program director of the Colorado Civic Engagement Roundtable; executive director of the Colorado Latino Leadership, Advocacy and Research Organization; and policy analyst of FRESC: Good Jobs, Strong Communities.

Her endeavors have impacted voters statewide. Gonzalez worked with Colorado legislators to create and pass bills requiring in-person voting in county jails and expanding access to ballots in different languages, including establishing a translation hotline to interpret ballots for voters. She co-authored the 2018 ballot measures Amendments Y and Z, which created independent commissions to redraw congressional and state legislative districts.

As Jefferson County clerk, Gonzalez created a full-time community engagement staff position to connect with the county, established an advisory committee dedicated to improving equity and access to the office, and brought public participation into the typically closed-door county commission redistricting process by letting residents submit their own district maps and provide feedback on proposals.

Under her leadership, Jefferson County’s program bringing in-person voting to jails resulted in around 350 inmates casting ballots in the 2024 election – compared to only three out of nearly 1,000 eligible voters in 2022.

Our video attached to this post was mysteriously deleted. Here is the video we posted about in-person inmate voting at the #Jeffco Jail. https://t.co/1T1spi5y9O pic.twitter.com/oobXCZAaJi

— Jeffco Sheriff (@jeffcosheriffco) November 5, 2024

“One man said he had never voted before but it was one of the top five experiences of his life because he felt like he mattered,” Gonzalez recalls. “I started welling up…. In a system that often tells people who look like me or my family members that they don’t matter, we just told them that they do.

“I want to be able to do that kind of work statewide,” she adds. “Making sure people’s voices are heard. I am really excited about that.”

If elected secretary of state, Gonzalez says she wants to increase community engagement, make the campaign finance system more transparent for the public, foster a closer relationship between the office and county clerks, and provide more support for clerks of small counties, such as offering resources for public information officers or technological services.

More broadly, Gonzalez says the next secretary must defend the state’s democratic systems during the second administration of President-elect Donald Trump, citing his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results and ongoing criticism of election systems. Gonzalez thinks she’s best suited to take on that task.

“It’s important that we have somebody who has run elections, somebody who has lived experience as the people [Trump] has vocally attacked, and somebody who is willing to do what’s right for the people no matter its popularity,” she says.

“Some of the work I’ve done while clerk, I had a lobbyist say to me, ‘You’re not going to get invited to any of the Jeffco barbecues.’ That’s okay. My headstone is not going to say, ‘Got invited to all the local political barbecues.’ But it is going to say ‘Got thousands of people ballots they could read and understand.’ It is going to say, ‘Got 350 people in the Jeffco jail a ballot they otherwise wouldn’t have gotten.’ I’ll take that all day, every day.”

Current Secretary of State Jena Griswold is term-limited in 2026. Griswold has been at the center of controversy in recent months after her office inadvertently leaked hundreds of voting equipment passwords on its website and failed to inform county clerks of the error until the story broke publicly.

Gonzalez says it’s hard to say how she would have handled the scandal as secretary. “I don’t know what the folks in that office did or didn’t know,” she says. But she adds that it’s important to “continuously communicate with the clerks and the public about what we know and what we’re doing.”

The password leak damaged public trust in the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office at a time when the nation is already grappling with waning faith in election systems, particularly among Republicans.

Only 28 percent of Republicans said they were confident votes would be accurately counted in the 2024 election, compared to 58 percent of independents and 84 percent of Democrats, according to a Gallup poll. Trust is rebounding among Republicans nationwide following Trump’s victory, but local skepticism remains. In late November, the Colorado Republican Party held an event where speakers spewed unfounded accusations of election fraud.

Gonzalez hopes to battle mistrust and polarization with communication and transparency.

“It is ultimately about trust,” Gonzalez says. “When people trust elections, trust the system, they’re more likely to participate. And that’s my whole goal. I want every eligible voter to vote, including people who disagree with me. That’s how democracy functions, and that’s how we get good results – if we all participate.”

She says she would approach the secretary position in a nonpartisan fashion. Although she thinks it’s important to communicate her liberal policy positions to voters, she wants to be a secretary for Coloradans on all sides of the political spectrum. Gonzalez is the only Democrat in her immediate family, she says, noting that her father and brother are both Trump supporters.

“I want people to know my values, and I want my dad to still feel welcome in the office. We can find common ground. I’ve literally been doing it since I was five years old,” Gonzalez says. “We don’t have to agree on everything, but we have to agree on fair rules and we have to play by them. We have to agree on democracy. Sometimes your team wins, sometimes it loses, but if we have fair systems, we can trust the results.”

Gonzalez is the first Democrat to formally announce her candidacy, according to campaign finance reports. Gonzalez says she’s starting early so that she can travel Colorado and hear directly from voters about what they want from their next secretary of state.

Nearly two years out from Election Day on November 3, 2026, she has a long campaign trail ahead.