While the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office is known primarily for running statewide elections, it’s also the office through which every business owner must go to register their companies — a fact that’s not lost on the candidates seeking that office this year.
And while Democrat Amanda Gonzalez and Republican James Wiley have very divergent approaches on how they want to run elections — he wants to eliminate mail ballots and return to paper ballots cast on one day at precincts, she wants to continue with current practices — their differences on interacting with businesses are a bit more nuanced.
To be sure, both say on their websites and reiterated in interviews on the “Colorado Chamber Office Hours” podcast that streamlining business interactions with the office is a priority for them. Gonzalez, the former CEO of a cannabis business, knows how difficult it can be for small businesses to comply with complex rules, while Wiley lauds the benefits of a free market to humanity and said the office can make it faster and cheaper to launch small businesses.
What business improvements would help the most?
Wiley said he would like to allow for automatic business registration renewals, believing that elimination of the recurrent burden to re-register, as well as the $25 fee that goes along with it, will encourage entrepreneurs to start and maintain businesses.
Colorado Secretary of State candidate James Wiley answers questions on the “Colorado Chamber Office Office Hours” podcast.
“The key to that is making their lives easier,” he said of his plan to grow more small businesses in Colorado. “The hours that they spend interacting with the Secretary of State takes away from the hours that they are serving their customers and building the economy here in Colorado.”
Gonzalez said that most of the conversations she’s had with business owners have led her to believe that the filing system is straightforward and easy to use. However, she’s heard criticism that it the business-filing system is more difficult to understand for people who speak English as a second language and would like to try to address that.
“I want to make sure that every business owner has the resources that they need to start and grow a business,” she said.
The road to becoming secretary of state
Both Wiley and Gonzalez come at the office largely from a background of election reform and oversight.
Amanda Gonzalez appears on the “Colorado Chamber Office Hours” podcast.
Gonzalez served as CEO of Colorado Common Cause, a voting-rights and election-watchdog organization, and helped to write laws that expanded the number of voting drop boxes in the state and that registered people to vote as they registered motor vehicles. She has served for the past four years as the elected clerk and recorder in Jefferson County, overseeing elections in Colorado’s fourth-most-populous county and running five motor vehicle offices.
Wiley, meanwhile, has observed the system from the outside in, working for organizations that have filed a number of legal actions critical of Colorado’s voting process. Those include lawsuits against electronic-voting-machines producer Dominion Voting Systems and filed on behalf of the Colorado Recount Coalition that unsuccessfully questioned results of four Republican contests, including one involving lightning-rod election-results denier Tina Peters, during the 2022 primary.
While Gonzalez hasn’t registered businesses as a county clerk and recorder, she created an innovation director position that delved into how to help county residents interact with the office — an experience she called similar to dealing with business registrants. That director launched a chatbot for the motor-vehicle division that reduced calls to the division and sped up the time in which they county residents were served, and said she plans to bring the same idea to the secretary of state’s office if elected.
Are business records secure enough?
Wiley, meanwhile, believes one of the secure-election changes he seeks to make — putting voter records onto blockchain ledgers to boost security — also could help business owners worry less about whether their records were accessed or compromised for fraud purposes. Blockchain allows the public to verify through cryptography hashes whether any changes were made within that chain, and he is working on technology that he hopes to produce and distribute to other secretaries of state nationwide as an open-source technology.
Gonzalez said that while security measures must be updated constantly to keep up with changing technology, she believes the office is guarding business records well now.
In addition to registering their companies with the secretary of state’s office, business owners must pay fees for all kinds of transactions as well, from $10 for a name change to $50 for late-filing penalties to $100 for reinstatements. Current Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who is running this year to be Colorado attorney general, reduced registration fees to $1 for a year during her term to try to boost registration numbers after the pandemic.
Are business fees appropriate?
Wiley said he would like to find ways to reduce those fees across the board permanently, though he didn’t identify specific prices he would like to charge. While fees should be set at a rate high enough that the registrar can verify that the registrant is who they say they are, they should not be so high as to discourage registration, renewal or reinstatement, and Wiley said he worries that could be the case now.
Gonzalez said the fees “seem about right to me” but emphasized that the office should review them regularly. The question she will ask in doing so, she said, is whether they are at the proper level to give the office the resources it needs to serve businesses and communities.
In May, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser launched a crackdown on businesses that fraudulently filed registrations using the addresses of unsuspecting Colorado property owners, with many of the suspected perpetrators hailing from China and southeast Asia. The fake businesses were then able to scam people out of money by pretending to be cryptocurrency companies, online investment firms, dating apps and more.
The National Federation of Independent Business unsuccessfully sued Colorado a half-decade ago, arguing the office’s use of those fees — they are the primary method of funding statewide elections, as well as funding business-registration systems — is inappropriate. Both candidates acknowledged in interviews that the having elections funded by business fees may be awkward, but while Wiley said he’s like to reduce the cost of elections (and fees), neither said they’ll push to disassociate business fees from that purpose.
Other secretary of state functions
Both also said they will continue an existing data center that uses aggregate business-filing information in partnership with University of Colorado to determine economic trends — and sells more detailed information to businesses upon request. Wiley said he would look to modernize the office’s website to make information more accessible to all businesses, and Gonzalez said she also would look to see what improvements she could make.
Finally, when it comes to the office’s other core mission of overseeing Colorado elections, the candidates diverge on whether major changes are needed.
Wiley said that the issue of whether elections are safe — and he believes that is a very legitimate question — has divided Americans enough that Colorado must start over with paper balloting at polling places, even if it’s less convenient for businesses and workers.
Are Colorado’s elections safe?
“There is some convenience there that will be sacrificed — and substituted also with the convenience of it being at the precinct level,” Wiley said of the voting process as he envisions it if elected. “There is an exchange that takes place. But ultimately, the ideal — the goal that we have and are pursuing — … isn’t convenience. It is trust. And we’ve lost sight of that primary purpose.”
Gonzalez disagrees wholeheartedly. Having written election laws and then overseen elections for the past four years, she believes Colorado’s voting system is a model — a result backed up by the high percentage of residents that cast ballots here, she said. And as she touts her campaign to be one about helping residents vote and businesses register as easily as they can today, she is looking at tweaks rather than overhauls in how the secretary of state’s office operates.
“Our elections really are some of the strongest in the nation,” Gonzalez said. “I think my background really sets me up well to be Colorado’s next secretary of state.”