Governor Jared Polis put a new justice on the Colorado Supreme Court this week. Susan Blanco has an impressive resume. Finding her in Colorado’s public records is another matter entirely.
Polis announced Blanco’s appointment on February 17, filling the vacancy left when Justice Melissa Hart retired January 5 after an unexplained leave of absence that began in late October. Hart cited health issues from two concussions she suffered in 2025. The seat had been empty for months. Polis picked Blanco over two other finalists and made the appointment effective immediately.
On paper, Blanco is accomplished. According to her application, she served as Chief Judge of the 8th Judicial District covering Larimer and Jackson Counties — the first woman to hold that title. She earned a B.S. in psychology from Colorado State University, a J.D. from the University of Colorado School of Law, and an LL.M. from Duke Law School.
She spent three years as a deputy district attorney, a decade in private practice, and nine years on the bench. She created Colorado’s first Competency Court, launched a Veterans Treatment Court, and chaired multiple statewide judicial committees. Governor Hickenlooper appointed her to the district court bench in 2016.
So who is she married to? Her application says her husband is a dean of an alternative high school and owns a custom fly-fishing business called WYCO FlyCo — which Colorado Secretary of State records show was registered in 2007 and dissolved in 2008, less than a year later. The application describes it as a going concern. His name does not appear anywhere in the application.
What political party does she belong to? Unknown. Her application says she is “not active in partisan politics given my ethical duties as a sitting judicial officer.” That is technically accurate for her time on the bench since 2017. It says nothing about her political activity before that.
A search of Colorado’s statewide voter registration database — 4.38 million records — returned zero results for Susan Blanco, Susan J. Blanco, or Susan Jasmine Blanco. That last name is her full legal name according to the Colorado Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. Her application, which asks for “Full Name, including middle name or initial,” lists only “Susan Blanco.”
She does not appear to be a registered voter in the state of Colorado.
Article VI, Section 20 of the Colorado Constitution requires that Supreme Court justices be “qualified electors of the State of Colorado.” The press release announcing this vacancy used the same language. A qualified elector, under the Colorado Constitution, is a citizen who is registered to vote.
The application to become a Supreme Court justice does not ask whether the applicant is a citizen. It once did. A version of the form hosted by the Colorado Bar Association, revised in April 2009, asked at Question 3: “Are you a United States citizen?” The current form skips directly from birth year to attorney registration number.
The citizenship question was removed sometime between 2009 and the present revision, dated December 2025. The question about qualified elector status is buried in the confidential section of the application — Question 33 — which is never released to the public, even after a candidate is forwarded to the governor.
The public cannot verify whether Blanco answered that question, or how.
Other judges in her district manage to appear in the voter rolls. Blanco does not.
Her application lists her residences as Windsor, Colorado, and Fort Collins. A check on the assessor’s website does not show any property at the Windsor address. There is a nice house sitting there.
Blanco was born in 1977, according to her application. In a University of Colorado Law School interview, she said she was “born and raised in Colorado.” Her application tells a compelling personal story: her family fled Iran during the Revolution and was “protected by political asylum.” She describes a childhood shaped by her parents’ divorce, split between scarcity and privilege.
The Iranian Revolution began in 1978 and culminated in February 1979. Blanco was born in 1977. If her family fled during the Revolution, they left Iran after she was born.
Her application states she was born and raised in Colorado. Both things cannot be precisely true unless the family was in the United States when she was born, returned to Iran, and then fled back after the Revolution began. That is possible. It is also the kind of biographical detail that a nominating commission vetting a Supreme Court candidate might want to clarify.
The nominating commission forwarded three finalists to Polis. The other two were Andrea Wang and Christopher Zenisek.
Wang served as Deputy Solicitor General in the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, specializing in water law and energy litigation. Before that, she spent nearly a decade as an Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting companies that defrauded the federal government. She clerked for former Chief Justice Mary Mullarkey on a landmark property rights case and was a finalist for this same court in 2020, when Polis chose Berkenkotter instead. She earned her law degree from the University of Colorado in 2001.
Zenisek has served as a district court judge in Jefferson and Gilpin Counties since 2012. He presided over roughly 100 jury trials. His highest-profile case was the Marshall Fire litigation involving 4,000 plaintiffs. It resolved in a $640 million settlement on the eve of trial. He serves on the Supreme Court’s Civil Rules Committee and previously worked as a prosecutor in Boulder County and a civil litigator at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.
Both Wang and Zenisek also do not appear in Colorado’s statewide voter registration database. The nominating commission forwarded three candidates to the governor, and not one of them can be confirmed as a qualified elector from the state’s own records. The application did not ask.
Polis said he picked Blanco because he was “looking for somebody who’d be a strong operator” with a track record of “operational achievements.” Based on publicly available qualifications, Wang brought deeper appellate experience, federal litigation credentials, and Supreme Court-level familiarity from her clerkship. Zenisek brought more extensive trial experience and management of the most complex civil litigation in recent Colorado history. Blanco brought administrative leadership and community programming.
Colorado passed voter record privacy legislation in recent years. It is worth noting that Blanco’s absence from public records dates to at least 2024, when the voter rolls were compiled. Sitting judges in her own district appear in those same records without difficulty.
Blanco will serve until November 2028, when voters will decide whether to retain her for a ten-year term. She pledged to serve with “independence, integrity, and fidelity to the Constitution.” The Constitution she pledged to uphold requires her to be a qualified elector. The application she submitted to get the job never asked if she was one. And the public has no way to find out.
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