Tina Peters, a former county clerk in Colorado in her late sixties, has received a nine-year prison sentence for allowing 2020 election skeptics to replicate Dominion voting machine hard drives to check for evidence of fraud. Peters was convicted in August of multiple charges, including official misconduct. The charges stem from her use of another person’s security badge to allow access to Mesa County election equipment by an individual connected to election skeptic Mike Lindell.
The “breach” led to the online dissemination of sensitive data, necessitating the replacement of the county’s voting equipment—with more Dominion machines. During closing arguments, prosecutor Jessica Drake characterized Peters as “a fox guarding the henhouse,” noting her responsibility to secure the election equipment and alleging she failed to do so.
Despite the verdict, Peters insists she is innocent and was trying to safeguard election integrity. “It is with a heavy heart that I hear the vile accusations and anger levied against me,” she told the court, requesting probation instead of imprisonment.
Twenty-first Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett has instead opted for a harsh prison sentence. “I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” Barrett said of Peters, calling the senior citizen “as defiant a defendant as this court has seen.”
Following Peters’s “breach,” lawmakers in Colorado passed the so-called Colorado Election Security Act (SB22-153), which contains unrelated provisions that effectively outlaw the hand-counting of ballots in favor of mandatory machine counting. The National Association of State Election Directors (NASED) requested this anti-election integrity measure to stop the “election denial world” from requesting hand counts to verify the validity of vote counts.
