A former Denver Elections worker is suing the city and alleges she was wrongfully punished for appearing on a show with Jon Stewart in 2022.
Virginia Chau was a part-time supervisor for the elections office when she appeared on “The Problem with Jon Stewart” for an interview about threats to election workers and other topics. She claims she was subsequently demoted for speaking out on the show.
Two years later, Chau has filed a lawsuit against the City and County of Denver, Clerk and Recorder Paul López and her former boss. The allegation: The city violated her First Amendment rights.
The Clerk and Recorder’s Office declined to comment on the case.
On Stewart's show, Chau described the challenges of getting people to participate in elections. She also talked about safety concerns for poll workers and elected officials.
When Stewart asked whether election workers were trained to deal with active shooter threats, Chau essentially said there was no plan or particular law to protect poll workers.
“There’s no structure,” she said. “There’s no training for that. You don’t know what to do until things happen.”
Civil rights attorneys David Lane and Liana Orshan are representing Chau in the case. Chau is also an attorney herself.
“I want the public to understand that they don’t have to be afraid to speak up about matters of public concern, regardless of what their employer thinks — if their employer is the government,” Lane said.
The lawsuit alleges the city failed to take appropriate action, and instead fired Chau for talking to Jon Stewart.
“Defendants’ termination of Ms. Chau’s employment was clearly designed to punish Ms. Chau for her First Amendment protected speech and to silence her on this matter of both local and national importance, in violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the lawsuit claims.
Chau had worked at voter service and polling centers for four years over eight elections. She oversaw as many as 30 election judges during this time.
She took breaks from her full-time job as an attorney to work on elections. In the lawsuit, she said that she had faced rising antagonism from voters, which ultimately led to her appearance on Stewart’s Apple TV+ show.
During the 2020 election, voters called her “the China virus” and blamed her for COVID, according to the lawsuit. Some asked if she was a citizen, or demanded a “Christian” help them, the lawsuit stated.
The lawsuit states that Chau saw a rise in hostility toward election judges after former President Donald Trump made claims about the election being stolen. After a particularly aggressive voter confronted her, she asked officials to provide on-site police officers to protect election judges, according to the lawsuit.
The city provided security after that incident.
But the lawsuit alleges that Denver failed to provide enough training and other resources to keep election judges safe. Election judges received one-week training that included no information about how to respond to aggressive voters. Chau instead offered training for her own staff.
Ultimately, Chau joined a cross-partisan political reform group called Issue One that works to create an inclusive democracy. Through that work, and in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, she was invited to appear on “The Problem with Jon Stewart.”
She never described herself on the show as representing the City of Denver.
After the show aired, Chau met with her boss.
R. Todd Davidson, the local elections director, told Chau was liked by coworker. But he said she was being removed as a polls supervisor because of her comments on the show, per the lawsuit.
Davidson reportedly said Chau would be demoted to a hotline representative; the office did not want anyone to recognize her from her appearance on the program, the lawsuit claims.
Chau refused the demotion and contacted Clerk and Recorder López about her termination. He never responded to her messages, the lawsuit states.
The suit claims the city attempted to chill her right to free speech, denied her due-process over the termination, and harmed her in multiple ways. The lawsuit seeks economic, compensatory and punitive damages. The claim doesn’t name a specific dollar amount. It also requests that Chau get her old job back, and that the city improves training and diversity for the elections staff.
Winning money is not the goal of the lawsuit, Lane said. Chau wants the city to acknowledge it violated the First Amendment.
