Former Colorado official found guilty for role in election equipment tampering

A Colorado jury on Monday found a former county election official guilty of seven charges connected to allowing a purported computer expert to copy election data from her office as Donald Trump and his allies spread false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and searched for evidence to prove it.

Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, was found guilty on seven of 10 charges, including several counts of attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. She will be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face prison time.

Peters is one of the few officials to face consequences for using their positions in local elections offices to try to prove false claims that took root after Trump’s defeat.

The verdict comes three months ahead of the 2024 presidential election and as Trump is already seeking to sow doubt about the fairness of the electoral outcome. As election officials around the nation have confronted years of hostility and suspicion about their work from those outside their offices, they have also sought to prevent — and prepare — threats from people working within.

Election experts have cited the breach in Mesa County as a consequence of falsehoods spread about voting systems. Peters has been embraced and championed by many of those who continue to falsely claim the 2020 presidential election was rigged.

Peters stood as 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett warned those gathered in his courtroom against verbal outbursts before he read the verdict. The decision came about four hours after closing arguments in the closely watched trial, which lasted more than a week. Peters did not show visible emotion as the verdict was read or as the judge ordered her to report to a probation office on Tuesday.

The jury found her not guilty of three counts: criminal impersonation, a count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and identity theft.

Prosecutors charged Peters in 2022 and accused her of helping secretly copy Dominion Voting Systems hard drives by sneaking a former professional surfer and purported computer expert into secure areas of her office in 2021 using someone else’s security badge. Within months, data from her office appeared online and was featured at a symposium held by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who continues to trumpet false claims about elections and seeks to end the use of machines that count ballots.

Closing arguments in the case began Monday, with prosecutors telling jurors that Peters tricked election workers and other public employees to let an outsider take images of the county’s election system hard drive to cast herself as a hero at a Lindell event.

“This case is simply about crimes committed by her in concert with others that were simply designed to be a coverup — and that this case is a simple case centered around the use of deceit to commit a fraud,” said prosecutor Robert Shapiro. “It’s not about computers, it’s not about election records. It’s about using deceit to trick and manipulate others … who were simply trying to do their job.”

Her attorney, John Case, maintained that Peters was seeking to save records to help determine if foreign individuals had accessed voting systems while ballots were still being tabulated.

He told jurors on Monday morning that they were the only thing “that stands between Clerk Peters and that government semi” truck. He sought to cast doubt that Peters stood to gain anything of value for her actions and said that she sought to find purpose in her job and community after her son died.

Peters, who did not testify, was the first election official to face criminal charges after the 2020 election, according to election experts.

Peters cast doubts on the 2020 election and raised further concerns after an April 2021 municipal election. Soon afterward, she met with Douglas Frank, a high school math teacher who has made appearances around the country to question how elections are conducted. Frank told Peters he believed an upcoming software update would delete data that would prove the election had been rigged, he told The Washington Post in 2022. She sought help, and he relayed her request to someone in Lindell’s circle, he said.

Peters was accused of allowing Conan Hayes, the former professional surfer who was affiliated with Lindell, to watch the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of another man who Peters had said worked for her. Prosecutors alleged that Peters’s activities amounted to identity theft — an allegation Peters disputed.

Later, in August 2021, Ron Watkins, who has ties to false election theories spread in Colorado, Arizona and elsewhere, published photos of election equipment and passwords that were quickly traced to Mesa County. Watkins is the former administrator of the 8kun message board that has been a hotbed of posts about the QAnon conspiracy theory.

A week after Watkins first posted about the equipment, copies of two Mesa County hard drives appeared online. Soon afterward, Peters said she commissioned someone to copy the hard drives to preserve their data and compare them to the hard drives after the software update.

After the material appeared online, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold (D) successfully sued to block Peters from running elections. Peters in 2022 ran for secretary of state but lost the Republican primary. Griswold said in a statement Monday night that Peters “will now face the consequences of her actions.”

“Today’s verdict sends a clear message: we will not tolerate any effort to threaten the security of our gold standard elections,” she said.

The Colorado County Clerks Association said in a statement that clerks around the state were pleased with the verdict.

“We take seriously our role as guardians of the best election process in the nation and are grateful to see the justice system hold those who would harm our elections accountable,” executive director Matt Crane said in a statement.

Despite the charges, Peters has not stopped promoting baseless information. Ahead of the trial, Peters appeared on the Conservative Daily podcast and claimed without evidence that someone was able to inflate the voting rolls and cast ballots in the names of others. She blamed “the deep state” for her divorce and called for ending the use of voting machines.

“They’re coming after me because I exposed this,” she said on the podcast in June. “The deep state all the way up to [Attorney General] Merrick Garland, they want to put me in prison to send a chilling effect to everyone out there that speaks out about elections, that speaks out about elections that they will not question anymore. Just like what they did with the January 6 hostages.”

She used the appearance to promote jury nullification — the practice of juries acquitting someone who they believe broke the law. “There’s some really good people out there talking about jury nullification,” she said.

She added: “When the jury walks in, the judge and the gallery rises because they are the law. If a law is unrighteous, they can actually rule against it in favor of the defendant.”

Before she was elected the Mesa County clerk, Peters ran a family construction company and for a time sold magnets and other wellness products through a multilevel marketing company. Early in her tenure, her office failed to collect 574 ballots that had been left in a drop box for a November 2019 election. An effort to recall her failed.