As usual, far too many interesting articles appeared recently on the Colorado Politics website. A large number of them have one take or another on the upcoming election, which makes a lot of sense for this publication. One article in particular caught my eye because of the larger danger it represents to the political process.

I live in Colorado Springs, a lovely town, in the lovely county of El Paso, both with a great deal to offer the visitor or the resident. But though the Garden of the Gods is a truly amazing city park (I’m quite sure that if it were in, say, Indiana, it would be a national park – seriously, you should visit) and the rest of the county offers additional wonders, it is, for a life-long moderate Democrat and political junkie like myself, a rather odd place of the deepest red with the occasional tiny splash of blue.

The county is entirely under the control of the GOP and to a former poli-sci professor like myself, the Republicans here offer a near-endless show of division, derision and disapproval. CoPo has reported before on the massive split in the county GOP, with the current chair of the party, Vickie Tonkins, again at war with her own party apparatus.

Tonkins’ current kerfuffle has to do with election judges here in El Paso County. She objects to several and has demanded that our Clerk and Recorder, Chuck Broerman, remove several GOP-appointed judges at once, because they “no longer represent the El Paso County Republican Party and my Administration.” I must say, back in 2010 when I was the chair of the El Paso County Democratic Party, I never once referred to “my administration” when talking about my team, but I digress…

Because of policies that need to be fixed, these judges have no right to appeal or to ask for reconsideration. That’s just not fair. But Tonkins is up in arms because these folks, she asserts, were basically disloyal to her and ultimately to some guy named Trump. Apparently, a group of GOPers broke with the party to try to get more Republicans elected to office in the county. Asserting that the actual GOP party hadn’t done the job, these breakaway folks created a group called “Peak Republicans,” with the goal of increasing the GOP voter. All that is pretty normal, but Tonkins apparently saw this breakaway group as some sort of threat to, I guess, her “administration.”

And because pettiness is apparently a core virtue of the El Paso GOP, Tonkins attacked her own party’s folks that were also serving as election judges. Broerman noted that volunteers from both parties had always served “with distinction.” These judges work in bipartisan teams to do much of the vital but tedious work of opening envelopes, verifying signatures, and such. Back when I was chair of the Dems here, I had many, many disagreements with the local, state and national GOPers, but I never once worried about the security or honesty of the folks who ran the elections. The elections division of the Clerk’s Office was always run by people of honor, behind really big windows that allow folks to watch the process – a process that is slightly more interesting than watching paint dry, but is, of course, vital to our liberty.

Herein we see yet another example of the ongoing damage a certain orange-ish former president has done. A county entirely run by Republicans has an open and honest election process, with bipartisan observers keeping an eye on things, and yet in this post-Trump era, any suggestion that elections are free and fair is anathema to some people. It was just a couple of months ago that the races for clerk and for coroner were claimed to be “fixed” by candidates who lost in the GOP primary by overwhelming margins. GOPers claimed that other GOPers were cooking the books. And to no reasonable person’s surprise, the recount confirmed the earlier results.

I believe that Trump was quite sure he was going to lose, first in 2016 and then again in 2020. In that first election, recall that Trump planted the first seeds regarding the supposed corruption of the entire electoral process. When he eked out a tiny victory, those claims were filed away, for about a week. In the run-up to 2020, Trump’s message was that if he didn’t win, he was the victim of cheating.

Never in our history has a major party candidate made such an assertion. We continue to live with the echo of Trumpian nonsense, now to include some nice local GOPers getting kicked out of a job they volunteered to do for years – helping with our safe and secure elections – because they did not properly bow down to a local party chair, and her “administration.”

My worry, of course, is that this is but one example of many thousands of grassroots-level attacks on the electoral process. And now, here in El Paso County, with no elected Dems to attack, the GOP has turned on itself. Around the country we see the GOP embracing vacuous candidates (cough… Oz… cough) and extreme crazies (cough… Boebert… cough) because they say “hail Trump” even as they have no actual policy ideas to put forward.

Now, with, a week or so before election day, Broerman has replaced those he was forced to fire with additional volunteers, and the election process will, yet again, run smoothly and accurately. A victory over pettiness? Perhaps, but perhaps, also, a warning sign of an unsettled future. Let’s keep our eyes open, shall we?

Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.