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Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Courthouse News Service
Tuesday, September 3, 2024 | Back issues
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Colorado elections clerk guilty on most charges over voting machine data leak

Former Mesa County clerk-recorder Tina Peters declined to take the stand after the judge refused to allow her to tell jurors her accomplice was a government informant.

GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (CN) — After just four hours of deliberation, a Colorado jury on Monday unanimously found former Mesa County clerk-recorder Tina Peters guilty of four felonies and three misdemeanors out of 10 charges related to a 2021 leak of voting machine data.

Peters had faced three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant, four felony counts related to impersonation and identity theft and three misdemeanor counts of official misconduct, violation of duties and failure to comply with the secretary of state’s requirements.

“This case is simply about crimes committed by her in concert with others that were designed to be a cover-up,” special deputy district attorney Robert Shapiro told the jury in closing. “This case is not about computers, it’s not about election documents, it’s about using deceit to trick public servants.”

The jury largely agreed, clearing Peters on only two of the felony impersonation counts and one of the felony identity theft charges. Peters faces up to seven years in prison depending on whether she's sentenced consecutively or concurrently.

Prosecutors called half a dozen state and county elections staffers, as well as a man whose identity was misused, to piece together the timeline of events from April 2021 through August 2021. That's when investigators say Peters brought Conan Hayes, an unauthorized third party, into the county tabulation room during a sensitive voting machine update done in person since the machines aren’t allowed to connect to the internet.

In August 2021, Ron Watkins, a key figure in the QAnon conspiracy movement posted forensic images of Mesa County’s voting machines along with video of the update and partially blurred passwords, prompting local and federal investigations.

In civil court, Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold successfully sued to remove Peters from fulfilling election duties, fueling Peters' narrative of state persecution.

The jury heard little about QAnon and wider theories of election fraud, per pretrial orders from 21st Judicial District Judge Matthew Barrett. An appointee of Democratic Governor Jared Polis, Barrett rejected evidence and testimony he saw as irrelevant or prejudicial, and directed the parties to focus on the specific charges before them.

Peters’ third and final defense team includes attorney John Case of Littleton, Colorado, along with former Summit County, Ohio, Judge Amy Jones and Michigan-based Dan Hartman, who has represented his state's Republican Party in court.

Rumors of election fraud didn’t circulate Mesa County in full force right after the 2020 presidential election. Instead concerns of election integrity took the rural Western Slope community by storm following the 2021 Grand Junction municipal election, when the most conservative candidates lost bids for City Council.

Members of Stand for the Constitution, a local conservative group, had taken to canvasing neighborhoods to verify voter rolls. Here, Peters met Sherronna Bishop, a prominent right-wing activist.

Bishop brought Peters a list of grassroots-gathered voter roll inconsistencies along with Dr. Douglas Frank, an Ohio math teacher who traveled the country after the 2020 election with a since-debunked algorithm he claimed detected so-called phantom votes.

An associate of My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, Frank promised to bring Peters a tech consultant who could back up voting machine files that were set to be deleted in the May 2021 trusted build.

The county’s Republican district attorney, Daniel Rubinstein, investigated Peters' claims of election fraud. Rather than concerted efforts to change election results, Rubinstein discovered several instances of human error.

In April 2021, Peters initially asked Dominion Voting Systems if she could bring members of the public in to observe the trusted build as she did with pre- and post-election procedures. Word came through the Colorado Secretary of State's office that Covid-19 policies prohibited any outsiders from attending the update.

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Peters then asked her own IT department to send two techs from different political parties, but no one had the expertise to analyze the process.

Bishop finally brought in Jerry Wood, a computer scientist who canvased with Stand for the Constitution. Calling him a consultant, Peters obtained a county keycard for Wood but never actually hired or paid him.

But Wood’s name appeared in entry logs when his keycard was used to access the tabulation room before and during the trusted build.

Wood eventually cleared his name by providing emails and photos that proved he had been hosting a graduation party and working on the days when his badge had been used to access secure voting machine rooms.

Prosecutors say Peters used Wood’s identity to cover for rogue technician Hayes. Peters’ defense countered that when Wood realized he was unable to take a forensic image, he consented to have his county credentials used. Either way, Hayes asked Peters to conceal his identity because he worked as a government informant.

Hayes’ dubious backstory remained a controversial piece of evidence that Barrett ultimately rejected as irrelevant and prejudicial to the jury.

“The attempt here is to bring in this evidence that doesn’t have anything to do with what the jury is going to decide, none of the charges here relate to computers or election crimes,” Barrett explained after the jury left this past Friday. “This is not the forum for the resolution of those issues.”

Peters ultimately hinged her decision not to testify on whether Barrett would let her tell her version of the truth.

“I understand I’m not allowed to tell the jury that Conan Hayes in fact was a government informant, but I concealed his identity to protect him and whether you allow me to tell the jury that affects my decision to testify,” Peters told Barrett.

During closing arguments, Peters' defense abandoned the narrow argument that she had been trying to preserve election records as required by law, and instead highlighted all the evidence left out of the trial.

“Ms. Peters decided to protect Conan Hayes’ identity, and from that one decision the state has charged Clerk Peters with 10 crimes.” Case argued. “Why?”

In 2021, it violated norms to photograph and post pictures of voting equipment, but it wasn’t against the law. The Colorado legislature passed the Internal Election Security Measures Act in 2022 that banned taking photographs of voting equipment and made it a class 5 felony to allow unauthorized access to voting machines. If the law were in effect in 2021, Peters could have faced up to three years in prison and a $100,000 fine for the offense.

After Barrett directed the jury to weigh the evidence and witnesses presented, Case urged the group to give into imagination.

“They’ve got the power to subpoena anyone in the country, why didn’t you hear from Conan Hayes?” Case asked. “He’s the key to the whole case, but they didn’t have the guts to call him as a witness because they knew what he would say.

"You are the only thing that is standing between Clerk Peters and the government," Case added.

A group of local conservatives consistently packed the courtroom and said prayers in support of Peters. Some attended because they still question their county’s election results. Others see Peters' case as symbolic of a larger cultural war, in which “wokeism is the new religion and election deniers are the new demons,” explained a man in an Army special forces green beret beside a pickup truck emblazoned with a “God Bless you Tina Peters” banner.

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Categories / Criminal, Elections, Politics, Trials

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