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Election-denying Colorado employee sentenced to nine years in prison for machine tampering

Posted on by Vanessa
Election-denying Colorado employee sentenced to nine years in prison for machine tampering

Tina Peters was convicted of seven counts of tampering with Mesa County's voting machines. The judge in the case told her Thursday that he was confident she would do it again.

A former Republican county clerk who spread election conspiracy theories and tampered with voting machines in Colorado was sentenced to nine years in prison Thursday in a hearing in which the judge called her a “charlatan.”

Tina Peters, who denies that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election against Donald Trump, was found guilty of seven counts in August. These included attempting to influence a public official, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, failure to comply with an order of the Secretary of State and dereliction of duty. Three were felonies and four were misdemeanors.

Peters, 68, was charged in March 2022 after prosecutors said she unlawfully allowed someone to copy access passwords and other files from a secure voting system and post them online, exposing the machines to hackers.

The district's machines had to be replaced because all data, including passwords for the machines, were published on the Internet. Peters claimed she was unaware the information would be made public.

“This community has suffered greatly because of Ms. Peters' dishonesty, lack of transparency and refusal to take responsibility,” Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubinstein told USA TODAY in August.

Judge to Tina Peters: “You are a charlatan”

When she was sentenced to prison, Peters did not apologize, according to reports from local television station ABC 7.

“I have never done anything with malice to break the law. I just wanted to serve the people of Mesa County,” she said during the hearing in Denver.

Judge Matthew Barrett called Peters one of the most defiant defendants he had ever seen.

“You are not a hero. “You have abused your position – and you are a charlatan who has used and continues to use your former position to sell a snake oil that has proven time and time again to be crap,” Barrett said. “Their lies are well documented and these convictions are serious. I’m sure you would do it again if you could.”

Ties to other conservative election deniers

According to prosecutors, Peters stole a Mesa County employee's security badge to give a man who MyPillow founder Mike Lindell was acquainted with access to the county's voter systems, thereby perpetuating Lindell's false conspiracies about the validity of the 2020 election results support.

A year before her indictment, Peters appeared in South Dakota at Lindell's “bizarre election security symposium,” where files from Mesa County's voting system were shown on screen, the Detroit Free-Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, previously reported.

Prosecutor Janet Drake argued that Peters was “fixated on the desire to be a hero and impress Lindell,” according to a report from KRAK-TV.

Fernando Cervantes Jr. is a featured news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach him at [email protected] and follow him on X @fern_cerv_.

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