Former Colorado county election official Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in jail over her role in helping pro-Trump supporters access the Mesa County election system as part of a plot to subvert election results.
Peters was indicted in March 2022 for her role in allowing an unauthorized person, later linked to MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, to tamper with election equipment during the 2020 presidential election.
Peters’ conviction made her the first pro-Trump election official convicted for crimes related to proving Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Peters’ indictment stemmed from her participation in a plot to break into election machines under her supervision and copy data from them to prove fraud—instead voter information from the machines appeared online in August 2021, published in part by QAnon-affiliated conspiracy theorists like Ron Watkins.
Authorities took note of the leaked voter information and began an investigation, which resulted in Peter’s indictment.
Peters was “charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, and one count each of conspiracy to commit attempting to influence, criminal impersonation, impersonation conspiracy, identity theft, official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state’s office,” according to USA Today’s summary of the indictment.
Peters, who ran as a Republican for secretary of state and lost in 2022, has been unapologetic about her crime. In August she appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast and continued to push the roundly debunked claims of voter fraud.
“It’s hard to predict what they’ll do. I am a big threat to them. And, so the things that were done in this trial that people can go back and watch on Frank Speech (Lindell’s platform) was just atrocious,” Peters raged.
She added, “I mean, we’re going to continue to fight this in the law. And in the meantime, until they either kill me or put me in prison. You know, I’m going to keep speaking out about the injustice, about what’s going on in these big multinational global corporations that are that have these vote flipping software, that is basically, is in Serbia. We’ve already shown that people in my, that I’m accused of influencing, there’s emails between them and Serbia and Serbia Dominion employees.”