The Denver District Attorney is investigating the loss of voting passwords in Colorado

The Denver District Attorney's Office has launched an investigation into the sharing of voting system passwords that were posted on a state website for months leading up to the election and only deleted last month.

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold called the leak an accident and added that it did not pose an “immediate” safety threat, something the Colorado County Clerks Association also shared. The passwords are only part of a multi-layered security system and may only be used for personal access to voting systems in secured and monitored rooms.

“The State Department is supporting and cooperating closely with the Denver District Attorney’s investigation,” said Kailee Stiles, a spokeswoman for the Secretary of State’s office. “We welcome the additional transparency.”

Matt Jablow, a spokesman for the Denver District Attorney's Office, declined to provide further information about the investigation.

The mistake came amid skepticism about voting systems and sparked intense criticism from the Colorado Republican Party. Nationwide elections remain fair and reliable.

The passwords were on a hidden tab of a spreadsheet posted by an employee on the Secretary of State's website. After the leak became public, Gov. Jared Polis and Griswold launched a statewide effort to change the passwords and check for tampering.

On Election Day, a judge rejected a request from the state Libertarian Party to have the ballots counted by hand because of the leak. Judge Kandace Gerdes said there was no evidence that the voting equipment had been tampered with or altered.

Bedayn is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Associated Press writer Colleen Slevin in Denver contributed to this report.