A former Denver Elections employee is suing the city, claiming she was wrongly 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 against election workers and other topics. She claims she was subsequently demoted for speaking out on the show.

Two years later, Chau filed a lawsuit against the City and County of Denver, Clerk and Recorder Paul López and her former boss. The claim: The city violated its First Amendment rights.

The Clerk’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 spoke 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 specific law to protect poll workers.

“There is no structure,” she said. “There is no training for that. You don’t know what to do until something happens.”

Civil rights attorneys David Lane and Liana Orshan are representing Chau in the case. Chau is also a lawyer himself.

“I want the public to understand that they should not be afraid to speak out on matters of public interest, 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 speaking to Jon Stewart.

“Defendants’ termination of Ms. Chau’s employment was clearly intended 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 alleges.

Chau had worked in the electoral office and polling stations for four years during eight elections. During this time, she supervised as many as thirty election judges.

She took breaks from her full-time job as a lawyer to work on the election. In the lawsuit, she said she faced increasing hostility from voters, which eventually 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, the lawsuit said. Some asked if she was a citizen or demanded that a “Christian” help them, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleges that Chau saw an increase in hostility toward election judges after former President Donald Trump made claims that the election was stolen. After a particularly aggressive voter confronted her, she asked officials to provide police officers to the scene to protect election judges, the lawsuit said.

The city provided security after that incident.

But the lawsuit alleges that Denver has failed to provide sufficient training and other resources to keep election judges safe. Election judges received a week-long training that included no information on how to respond to aggressive voters. Chau instead offered training for her own staff.

Eventually, Chau joined a cross-party political reform group called Issue One, which works to create an inclusive democracy. Through that work, and in the aftermath 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 her boss.

R. Todd Davidson, the local elections director, said Chau was well-liked by his colleague. But he said she was removed as poll supervisor because of her comments on the show, according to the lawsuit.

Davidson reportedly said Chau would be demoted to hotline representative; the office did not want anyone to recognize her from her appearance on the program, the lawsuit alleges.

Chau refused the demotion and contacted Clerk and Recorder López about her dismissal. He never responded to her messages, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleges that the city attempted to limit her right to freedom of expression, denied her due process over the termination and harmed her in multiple ways. The lawsuit seeks economic, compensatory and punitive damages. The claim does not mention a specific dollar amount. It also calls for Chau to get her old job back, and for the city to improve training and diversity for election workers.

Winning money is not the goal of the lawsuit, Lane said. Chau wants the city to acknowledge that it violated the First Amendment.