Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold closed off access to the state's online election database, known as "TRACER," over the weekend, amid concerns about publicly available private information about politicians in the aftermath of the politically-motivated shootings and killings in Minnesota.

"Addresses and other personal information is on TRACER," Griswold said. "The reason it's on there is for public transparency. There is the ability for elected officials and candidates to request that their addresses are redacted, and so we wanted to give folks enough time to do that, and temporarily took TRACER down."

The site is where political candidates post their information to comply with election finance requirements, among other information.

 Monday carried the message, "Down for maintenance," which Griswold pointed out, does happen from time to time. After a few seconds on the error message, the website redirects you to another elections landing page on the Colorado Secretary of State's Office's website.

She said she had talked with legislative leadership and other statewide elected leaders about the existence of the information on the public database.

"Out of abundance of caution, we wanted to make sure that officials had the ability to think about whether they wanted their addresses redacted," Griswold said.

There are many places where people's private information can be potentially obtained online, but Griswold said the killing of a state representative and her husband and the shooting of a state senator and his wife in Minnesota made the review timely.

Griswold herself has been the subject of repeated threats, particularly following the 2020 elections. Four people have been convicted of charges related to making threats directed at her.

"It's coming from the real facts that elected officials are under increased threats. I myself received, just in 2024, over 1,800 death threats or physical threats. It is scary, and I think we have to take that as a fact of where this country is right now," she said. "And for me, weighing the choices of the safety of elected officials, Republicans and Democrats, and a brief outage of Tracer, that the choice was very clear."

Griswold said she had asked lawmakers if they wanted information like home addresses, which is not required, to be removed. The process of redacting information was taking time, and she said the site would likely remain down, but for a period of days, not weeks.