Former Jefferson County Clerk and Recorder George Stern is considering a run for Colorado secretary of state in two years, the Democrat told Colorado Politics.

Stern, 37, said his experience turning around one of the largest county clerk’s offices in the state could help bolster trust in Colorado’s elections at a time when the state’s voting system has been under heightened scrutiny.

“I think it’s more important than ever that we have people with election administration experience serving as secretaries of state throughout the country, as we work to continue to defend the integrity of our elections and also to rebuild trust in our elections,” Stern said in an interview.

Serving a four-year term, the Colorado secretary of state oversees the state’s elections and handles business registrations, as well as nonprofit and lobbyist reporting. Its current occupant, Jena Griswold — the first Democrat elected to the office since the early 1960s — is term-limited.

Elected in 2018 as the suburban county’s first Democratic clerk in 20 years, Stern, a former management consultant and longtime volunteer firefighter, steered the office through the pandemic and multiple elections in 2020, as well as post-election audits and what he termed the “nationwide noise” that accompanied Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine faith in the election results.

“And I worked throughout those to reach out to people across the political spectrum to make our elections more secure, more accessible, more transparent, and so, at this moment, I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to step up and use that experience to run for secretary of state,” Stern said.

During his four-year term, Stern’s office won a national award for innovations in elections administration from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. He also updated the office’s customer service practices on numerous fronts, from enabling county residents to use credit cards for marriage licenses and vehicle registrations to putting license tag kiosks in grocery stores throughout the county.

Late last month, Griswold acknowledged that her office had posted hundreds of system-level passwords for voting machines throughout the state in a publicly accessible spreadsheet that had appeared online for months. After the Colorado Republican Party publicized the leak a week before the November election, Griswold oversaw password updates with assistance provided by Gov. Jared Polis. She said her staff verified the election equipment was secure and hadn’t been tampered with.

The Denver District Attorney’s Office earlier this month opened an investigation into the password leak, and Griswold’s office has hired an outside law firm to look into the security breach.

Stern said that if he runs, working to restore confidence in the state’s voting system and avoiding those kind of mistakes will be his top priority.

“I’m happy there’s an ongoing independent investigation,” Stern said. “When that comes out, I’ll be reading the report very closely, and if I decide to run for secretary of state, election integrity, the security and accessibility of our elections, is going to be the No. 1 thing I’d talk about, and it’d be the No. 1 thing I’d focus on if elected.”

Stern said it’s up to election officials “at every level in this country,” from secretaries of state to local clerks, to communicate with voters.

“And I think we have to do even more than we’ve already been doing to bring people in from across the political spectrum, to show them our elections, to make them feel better about our elections,” he said. “And I feel confident that my four years leading elections in Jeffco, my respect for and relationships with our 64 county clerks, my experience managing a larger office, would let me lead on that issue, confidently, from day one.”

Stern added that the next secretary of state could face unknown challenges administering elections.

“I continue to think Colorado has some of the best election systems in the country, and we should continue to be the model. The reality though, of elections in today’s era is that the risks and the threats are changing constantly,” requiring a constant focus on security, he said. “We need to continue to stay one step ahead of bad actors, of misinformation, of potential foreign actors trying to infiltrate our system, of growing misinformation. That’s going to be a huge area for the next secretary of state to focus on.”

After he decided against seeking a second term in 2022, Stern and his family moved from Golden to Snowmass — “to give our kids the chance to live in the mountains while they’re young” — where he operates two small businesses, one that sells outdoor equipment and another that provides advice to companies.

“I am excited to bring my experience as a small business owner here in Colorado to focus on the business end of the office and in general,” he said. “I think one of the biggest roles of the secretary of state is as a manager, as a leader of a large government entity that impacts almost every person in the state, and that’s something that I have experience with — of turning around a government bureaucracy in Jeffco, taking us from from one of the worst performing counties across everything from DMV to ballot processing to one of the best.”

Stern, who has a bachelor degree from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard, said he plans to decide with his family whether to run “over the next several months.”

Other Democrats who have been making noise about potentially running for the seat include Senate President Steve Fenberg, D-Boulder; state Sens. Jeff Bridges, D-Centennial, and Jessie Danielson, D-Wheat Ridge; and Jeffco’s current clerk and recorder, Amanda Gonzalez.