Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold on Thursday announced enough signatures had been turned in to start a recall election against District Attorney Alonzo Payne of the 12th Judicial District, which covers Colorado’s six-county San Luis Valley region.

Payne was first elected to the office in 2020. His tenure has been marred by accusations that he is too soft on crime. Payne is also under investigation by the state Attorney General for alleged violations of the Victim’s Rights Act. The AG’s office has received eight complaints about Payne’s conduct toward victims.

Uproar in San Luis Valley over district attorney’s actions

Payne is a former Colorado public defender who ran on a criminal reform platform.

The Secretary of State’s office said that proponents of the petition to recall Payne submitted 5,974 petition signatures to the Elections Division on May 26. They needed at least 3,996 valid signatures or 25% of all votes cast in the 2020 election. The Elections Division said 4,757 of those signatures were valid.

Lani Welch, a crime victim in the 12th Judicial District and among the leaders of the recall effort, said Payne did not seek her opinion about plea negotiations in a case she filed against her ex-fiancé for third degree assault and stalking in 2020. Jeffery Tonso, the ex-fiancé, was on the run for seven months before he was apprehended in 2021 and sentenced to 18 months in jail on a drastically reduced charge of telephone obstruction for stealing her cellphone.

Welch said Tonso used to threaten to kill her by text, but made her delete all of those messages. She said she hid one and saved it for later.

“If I was within an arms length (sic), I’d punch you right in your s*** talking mouth,” he wrote Welch in Dec. 2019. “Respect!!! You don’t know what being respectful is.”

Welch said she filed a complaint against Payne – over his actions in her case – with the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center, and he responded to the Victims Rights Subcommittee in a letter calling her “hysterical.”

Payne justified the deal he gave Tonso by arguing he had no prior convictions, but Welch discovered through doing research on her own that he had been convicted of domestic violence five times before he met her in four other Colorado counties.

Welch told Colorado Politics Friday that June 22 “was the two-year anniversary of me taking the steps to change from a victim to a survivor by reporting the crime.”

“The past two years have been full of ups and downs. When we first started the recall process, while I had hope we would be successful, I also had fear we would fail. Yesterday, those fears were taken away when I received the notice that we had enough signatures to move forward with the recall,” Welch said.

“Seeing the citizens of the SLV come together and put people before politics is an overwhelming feeling,” Welch added. “I hope others will follow our lead.”

The Alamosa City Council, which also was part of the recall effort, contributed $10,000 to the petition drive.

Gov. Jared Polis will decide the date for the recall election once a 15-day clock for challenging the petitions expires. If there are no challenges, or the challenges are not successful, the election date will be set. If that date were to occur within 90 days of the general election – around August 10 –  the recall would be added to the November general election ballot, according to the Secretary of State’s office. 

Payne did not respond to a call for comment.