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 offices in the state could help bolster confidence in Colorado’s elections at a time when the state’s voting system has been under increased scrutiny.

“I think it’s more important than ever that we have people with election administration experience serving as secretaries of state across 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 .

The Colorado Secretary of State, who serves a four-year term, oversees the state’s elections and handles business registrations as well as reporting from nonprofits and lobbyists. 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 the 2020 multiple election, as well as post-election audits and what he called “nationwide noise” that accompanied Donald Trump’s attempts to undermine belief in the election results.

“And I worked through all of these to reach out to people across the political spectrum to make our elections safer, more accessible, more transparent, and so at this moment I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to step up and use that experience of running for foreign minister, says Stern.

During his four-year tenure, Stern’s office won a national award for innovations in election administration from the US Election Assistance Commission. He too updated the office’s customer service practices on many 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 statewide in a publicly available spreadsheet that had appeared online for months. After the Colorado Republican Party made the leak public a week before the November election, Griswold oversaw password updates with help from Gov. Jared Polis. She said her staff verified that the election equipment was secure and had not been tampered with.

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

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

“I’m glad there’s an independent investigation going on,” Stern said. “When it comes out, I will read the report very carefully, and if I decide to run for secretary of state, election integrity, the security and accessibility of our elections will be the first thing I would talk about, and that would be the first thing I would focus on whether I was elected.”

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

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

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

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

After he decided not to seek 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 runs two small businesses, one that sells outdoor equipment and another that advises businesses.

“I’m 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 for the secretary of state is as a manager, as a leader of a large government entity that affects almost every person in the state, and that’s something that I have experience with — turning around a government bureaucracy in Jeffco, and taking us from one of the worst performing counties across everything from DMV to ballot processing to one of the best.”

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

Other Democrats who have made 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.