The trial against a former Colorado elections clerk over her efforts combating election fraud is set to begin on Monday.
Tina Peters, who served as Mesa County Clerk and Recorder from January 2019 to January 2023, is being prosecuted by the Colorado Attorney General’s Office on seven charges, including felonies, related to alleged election tampering, official misconduct, and attempting to influence public servants in 2021. She is accused of allowing an unauthorized third party to make copies of voting machine hard drives, which led to “confidential digital images” of Dominion Voting Systems property and passwords to be “published on the internet,” prosecutors asserted.
Peters (pictured above) ended up a target of officials after making a backup of Mesa County’s Dominion server. She said she believed she found evidence of manipulation in a 2021 local city council election and the 2020 general election. Four progressive candidates for Mesa City Council won their races, which was a surprise, she said, even to the candidates since that area is 65 percent Republican and 35 percent Democrat.
According to an affidavit Peters submitted to the court on November 24, 2023, the controversy began when constituents alerted her to election anomalies that concerned her. At the same time, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold instructed her to participate in installing a software update known as a “Trusted Build” on the Mesa County election management system (EMS).
After speaking with an employee of Dominion Election Systems, Peters said she learned that the upgrade “would delete the QR code system that allows the system to read certain ballots.” This was a concern since it would make it “impossible to verify” the results of the 2020 and 2021 elections. She said she confirmed this would happen with a Griswold staff member.
Additionally, Peters worried that the upgrade would violate state and federal law. Federal law requires preserving election records for 22 months after an election, and Colorado state law requires preservation for 25 months. Violation of the federal law is a crime.
Peters said she didn’t trust Griswold since she was a partisan Democrat whose office “collaborated” with a recall effort against Peters. She said it was legal to “engage a consultant to make a forensic image of the EMS server.” She said, “Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Beall admitted under oath in a different case involving a different county clerk that making a forensic image of an EMS server was legal at the time it was done.”
She let her consultant use an employee badge and said he was supervised by an employee as required by law.
Peters advocated using an alternative election system instead of Dominion, Clear Ballot, since “[t]he system cannot be audited as required by federal law.” She sent a letter to the Mesa County Board of Commissioners on September 17, 2021, asking them to discontinue using Dominion, attaching an 85-page forensic report from cyber security expert Doug Gould. Gould found “extensive” “destruction of critical logfiles has occurred.”
Peters said she has been retaliated against ever since. She has not been allowed to see her husband in a memory care facility since October 2021 and was told she does not have power of attorney. The FBI exercised search warrants on her and her associates in November 2021, seizing equipment that has never been returned.
In February 2022, she turned herself in after being accused of obstructing the search warrant while her father was near death. She said she was not allowed to go near him, and he died while she was in jail. Due to her bond restrictions, she could not continue doing her job as a clerk. She said Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubenstein was able to prevent her from traveling out of state for her election integrity work.
Rubenstein indicted Peters and her deputy clerk, Belinda Knisley, in March 2022. She said she believes it was “politically motivated” since it occurred 22 days after she announced she was challenging Griswold to run for secretary of state. Seven days later, she delivered another request to the county commissioners, asking them to eliminate computer voting systems.
In that March 1, 2022 letter, she said the second forensic investigation found that “vote totals can easily be changed.” Contrary to assertions that the voting system cannot connect to the internet, Gould said “the Mesa County voting system alone was found to contain thirty-six (36) wireless devices, and the system was configured to allow ‘any computer in the world’ to connect to our EMS server.”
A third forensic investigation found “unauthorized creation of new election databases” during the 2020 and 2022 elections. It stated that thousands of ballot digital images were not copied to the new databases. Rubenstein published findings refuting the third investigation, which Peters responded to here.
Peters concluded in her affidavit that Rubenstein convinced the judge not to allow evidence into her trial that “exposes problems in the voting system,” so she does not believe she can get a fair trial. Additionally, Peters’ defense attorney, John Case, told CPR News that Grand Junction Daily Sentinel wrote more than “700 articles” about Peters “and they’re all negative. So we feel we’re starting with a biased jury pool.”
Knisley was also charged with six similar counts. In August 2022, Kinsley agreed to testify against Peters as part of a plea agreement. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanors and escaped confinement, receiving two years of unsupervised probation and 250 hours of community service.
X owner Elon Musk has taken an interest in the case. An election integrity investigator produced a video with his Cybertruck—Musk is CEO of Tesla, which recently started offering the EV Cybertruck—holding up a copy of the election data Peters had preserved, asking Musk to use his engineers to examine the code to see the flaws.
Musk responded, “I’m not sure how to help.” Peters responded to him by pointing out that the recent Crowdstrike internet outage resulted in the company recommending similar actions to what Peters took — backing up the database. She included podcaster CannConn’s post, which said, “CrowdStrike’s solution to the ‘outage’ is what @realtinapeters is facing jailtime over next week.”
@elonmusk @BehizyTweets @yehuda_miller https://t.co/rGBzhgKA7C
— Tina Peters🇺🇸 Whistleblower of fallen Navy SEAL (@realtinapeters) July 23, 2024
Fox News settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion last year for $787 million, the largest defamation verdict known in history. A lawyer familiar with the case told The Arizona Sun Times that Fox News settled because the judge made it clear, addressing the motions for summary judgment, that the jury would be given instructions to treat statements that Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell had made as false.
Peters spoke to an Arizona group in September 2022, including a screening documentary about her ordeal, Selection Code. The trial will occur at Mesa County courthouse in courtroom 9, presided over by District Court Judge Matthew Barrett. The review hearing is scheduled for July 29 at 9:00 a.m., and the jury trial begins on July 30 at 9:00 a.m. and concludes on August 12. WesternSlopeNow said it will livestream the trial. More information about the trial can be found on the website Free Tina, and her personal website is here.
– – –
Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to rachel.r.alexander@gmail.com.
Photo “Tina Peters” by Mesa County Sheriff’s Office.
