Tina Peters (politician)

Tina Peters (1955/1956) is Mesa County, Colorado's County Clerk and Recorder, and was noted in regional, national, and international news during 2020-22 for having a role in elections yet asserting election fraud. She was notably "one of at least twenty-two election deniers vying n 2022to take charge of elections in eighteen states.", and she has been the first elections official in the U.S. to face criminal charges related to stolen election conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Chronology

Her position as county clerk with Mesa County is her first elected office held, and, in October 2022 she still holds the position, despite being constrained in her functioning (in various ways, explained below). She campaigned with a platform that called for improvement in service from Colorado state's Division of Motor Vehicles' offices.

Subsequent to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Peters permitted access to voting machines to an outsider. She was indicted in 2021 "on charges that she allowed someone to improperly access and download data from election machines as she sought to prove that widespread fraud had occurred in the state’s 2020 presidential election." She was "the first elections official to face criminal charges related to conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 election, experts said. She is accused not of fixing the election but of breaking the law as she sought to investigate whether someone else did."

She was barred from supervising local elections in 2021 and 2022.

Peters has been in national news relating to her view on possibility of election fraud in the 2020 US presidential election, and with respect to an instance in which subsequent access to Mesa County voting machines was given. She was in Sioux Falls, South Dakota speaking at Mike Lindell's Cyber Symposium on Aug. 10, 2021, at around the same time that investigators from the Colorado Secretary of State's office were investigating how Ron Watkins obtained images from the Mesa County voting system.

In April 2022, at an appearance together, Lindell disclosed having personally donated an amount in the range from $200,000 to $800,000 to Peter's legal defense fund and campaign, in apparent violation of Colorado state law limiting donations of that type to $75. The state's ethics commission investigated the fund after a complaint about a lack of donor transparency.
Tina Peters denied prior knowledge.

She was a 2022 candidate for Colorado Secretary of State in Republican primary election which concluded Tuesday, June 28. She lost the primary election. She finished second of three candidates and, at least immediately following the release of result, suggested election fraud and did not accept the result. National and international news, before and after June 28, featured Peters in coverage of U.S. election deniers running for positions of management or influence in conduct of future elections.

In July 2022, a warrant for her arrest was issued, for her having travelled out of state without court permission as required, when she appeared at another Mike Lindell event, in Las Vegas. Peters claimed not to know of the restriction, her three attorneys claimed not to have told her, and the arrest order was cancelled.

Also in July 2022, a second warrant for her arrest was issued, and Peters turned herself in. She was arrested due to her having emailed multiple county clerk's offices, letting them know she was seeking a recount with hand counting, in violation of her bond conditions of her arrest for election machine tampering. After turning herself in, she was allowed to repost bond and was again released.

In late July 2022, Peters paid the $256k required for the state to conduct a manual recount of the voting for Colorado Secretary of State in Republican primary election in which she ran. The recount barely changed the totals, with Peters gaining 13 votes, and still having vote share of 29 percent. Peters filed suit challenging methods used in the recount, and on August 6, 2022 that suit was dismissed.

On August 7, 2022, Peters pled not guilty to all charges related to the alleged election machine tampering, and a trial was set for March of 2023.

Personal

Peters lives in Grand Junction, Colorado. Peters' son, Remington J. Peters, a combat veterean serving in the US military as a Navy SEAL, died in 2017 at age 27 in a parachute accident. Notices at the time indicated surviving him were father, mother, and a sister.

Before she ran for the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder position, "she ran a construction firm with her ex-husband and sold nutritional supplements and wellness products through a multilevel-marketing company. She was best known around the Western Slope of Colorado as the mother of a Navy seal who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and, in 2017, died in a catastrophic accident when his parachute failed to properly open during an air show over the Hudson River. Her main campaign pledge was to reopen shuttered Motor Vehicle Department offices in the county."

On September 7, The New Yorker published a long article by Sue Halpern titled: "The Election Official Who Tried to Prove "Stop the Steal": How a group of conspiracy theorists enlisted a county clerk in Colorado to find evidence that the 2020 vote was rigged."

References

External links

Tina Peters campaign website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Peters, Tina
1950s births
20th-century American women
Colorado politicians
County clerks in Colorado
Living people
People from Grand Junction, Colorado
Year of birth missing (living people)