She F’d Around and Found Out Hard

Election conspiracy peddler Tina Peters finally has to face the music.

Photo still of Tina Peters being arrested, from KDVR Television

It’s welcome to Findoutville for election conspiracy peddler Tina Peters.

After years of spreading false claims about election fraud and stoking conspiracies that would make your head spin, the law finally caught up to Peters in a Mesa County courtroom on Thursday. There, Judge Matthew Barrett delivered a nine-year sentence, after a jury earlier had found Peters, a former Mesa County, Colorado election official, guilty on seven charges relating to tampering with voting machines under her control. 

Specifically, the jury found that Peters and her co-conspirators had misused the ID of a software programmer to gain illegal access to Dominion Voting Systems code, all in a misguided and failed attempt to prove that the 2020 election had been rigged against Donald Trump.

In today’s piece, I want to tell Peters’s story in greater depth, not only for its cathartic and cautionary value, but also because it comes at a time where accountability is in short supply, especially for those who are eroding trust in our democratic institutions and system. 

She could have had a nice, peaceful rest of her life

The Peters story caught my attention yesterday because I’d actually written about her back in September of 2022. That story was in connection with news about her buddy Mike Lindell, the disgraced CEO of MyPillow, who had just had his phone seized by authorities. Lindell had been in communication with Peters, who by that time had already been indicted and charged with 10 counts related to her illegal accessing of election machines.

But let’s go back to a time when she was still a normal person living a normal life.

Tina Peters was a Mesa County, Colorado election official. She was a fairly standard Republican conservative, like most of her neighbors in that part of the state. Indeed, Trump won in Mesa County in 2020 with 63 percent of the vote, and no one ever claimed widespread election fraud.

An excellent New Yorker article about Peters described her pre-election-denying life this way:

Before Tina Peters campaigned for the office of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder, in 2018, 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. Despite having no public-service experience, she beat a fellow-Republican who had worked in the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s office for eleven years.

All good so far. 

But in 2021, Peters was swept up by the conspiratorial claims of an election fraud theorist named Douglas Frank, a high school math and science teacher and Covid skeptic who had traveled the country to tout a secret algorithm that, Frank claimed, showed how elections were rigged. (Narrator: Frank is a fraud, and his algorithm is silly.)

There’s an interesting “of course she was” small-world moment. As it turns out, Peters was introduced to Frank by her friend, Sherronna Bishop, who ran a podcast on parental rights called “America’s Mom.” Bishop earned notoriety after she had encouraged none other than Lauren Boebert to run for office. Bishop said she served as Boebert’s local campaign manager, though Boebert’s office says she was just one among many volunteers. Bishop later became director of “election security” at Moms for America. Because of course she did.

Peters gets red-pilled

Frank managed to convince Peters that dead people were voting in her county. Otherwise, without massive fraud, how else could a slate of four die-hard conservatives have lost their local elections for city council in Grand Junction, right? It couldn’t have been because people were tired of extremism. No, it definitely was dead people voting.

As the New Yorker piece on Peters and her keystone conspirators dryly recounted, 

A letter to a local newspaper noted a few weeks before the election that only four of the eight candidates showed up to a forum hosted by fifty-one community organizations. Those were the four candidates who won.

Frank often made wild, unsupported assertions that Dominion voting machines were inflating voter rolls in the system and then causing fake registrations to cast votes. But Frank needed to prove this in real life. So he set out to find a test county, preferably one that was very conservative and willing to work with him. If this sounds familiar, it reads a lot like the Coffee County election machine scheme in which kraken-lawyer Sidney Powell was involved in Georgia.

Peters became Frank’s target for this mission. Bishop had invited Frank to speak at a packed forum in Mesa County, where Frank dazzled the crowd with talk of “six-order polynomials” and “coefficients that go in front of high-exponent terms.” (Narrator: See? Silly.)

Convinced by Frank’s made-up numbers and math-speak, Peters began working with Frank to hatch an illegal plan to prove there was fraud built into the voting machines right there in Mesa County. Because, clearly, if Democrats wanted to cheat, that’s where they’d do it, right? In the middle of a deep red part of a state, in a county that never votes blue and where fraud would have to be quite obvious and extensive.

I don’t make the rules.

The criming begins

Peters knew that a software update called a “trusted build” had been scheduled for the county’s voting machines for May of 2021. Typically, such builds are conducted in person with no connection to the internet. Frank told Peters she needed to make a “pre-build” copy of the existing software as “evidence” to support their case that the Dominion software was set up to cheat. 

Here’s the point when Peters crossed the line into criminality. Eight days before the scheduled build, around May 17, 2021, Peters’s deputy, Belinda Knisley, instructed the I.T. Department to turn off the cameras in the area where the trusted build would take place. 

Not suspicious at all, right?

At Bishop’s recommendation, Peters reached out to a local software engineer, Gerald Wood, to do some contract work in the county’s election office. According to testimony Wood later gave, Peters’s office sent him for a background check, and he received an ID badge, which Knisley took from him saying they’d be in touch if they needed him. 

Two days before the build, as the Times reported, the ID was likely used by a close associate of Mike Lindell to access the elections office and copy the hard drive. After the update, another copy of the code was made that included proprietary Dominion software similar to code used around the whole country.

Lindell invited Peters and Bishop to a symposium in Sioux Falls in August of 2021, where files stolen from the Mesa County election system were projected on a big screen. That’s right, they started showing the fruits of their crimes openly, before the very kind people most likely to distribute the files illegally.

Find out time

By now, authorities were on to Peters and had searched her office. Peters’s big talk in Sioux Falls was shut down midway through, just as Frank was about to perform a live analysis of the data in real time.

In November of 2021, the FBI searched the homes of Peters and Bishop and seized their digital devices. A state grand jury was empaneled, and Peters and Knisley were indicted in March on a mix of felonies and misdemeanors. 

Peters was arrested later that summer while in a public eatery, and the video from that tells you a lot about the kind of woman she is. Watch as she demands that the officers let go of her and return her car keys, and she later threatens to show the “bruises” she received, all while cursing the arresting officers. This kind of resistance to an arrest only comes from decades of privilege.

Peters doubles down following her indictment and arrest

In true MAGA form, in the spring of 2022 Peters had the audacity to run for Colorado Secretary of State as an indicted criminal defendant with Sherronna Bishop as her campaign manager. She lost her 2022 primary by 88,000 votes, but naturally she disputed the results. She demanded a recount, paid for by her campaign at a cost of $255,000, but wound up netting only 12 additional votes from it. 

Matt Crane, a Republican member of the Colorado County Clerks Association, expressed his frustration with Peters and Bishop, saying they “at this point are carnival barkers.”

But just like her idol Trump, Bishop used the election loss to grift money from the MAGA right. Peters raised about $519,000, mostly through a July 25 appearance on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, to fund her election recount costs and her criminal defense. As Colorado News Online further reported, Crane asked whether it was fair to question Peters’s true motivations.

“I have wondered about that,” Crane said. “Just this afternoon, she and Sherronna are out there on one of their silly videos, where they’re lying about the process and asking people to continue sending in money. So why, why now?”

Despite her increasing legal jeopardy, Peters was unrepentant and continued to play the victim. After she was finally arrested and spent a night in county jail, Peters went straight onto Steve Bannon’s podcast again. She dialed up the martyrdom, complaining about the jail conditions and the food they served, all while the code “BANNON” for a discount off MyPillow purchases appeared below. Never waste a moment to fleece the viewers!

Even as late as this March, Peters scoffed at the idea of consequences for her crimes. Local news anchor Kyle Clark asked Peters whether she and/or Trump would be in prison in a year or two. Peters laughed and responded that if she thought she was going to prison, she’d be relaxing on a beach somewhere.

The sentencing

It took a long time for a jury trial of Peters to even happen. On the eve of her first trial, she fired all of her attorneys and demanded a continuance. But in the end, she only managed to delay justice, not prevent it. (Perhaps this theme can also be carried over to her idol, Donald Trump.)

Peters was quarrelsome and conspiracy driven to the very end, even arguing with an exasperated Judge Barrett while insisting he really does believe her election nonsense, forcing him to correct the record. Here was that exchange:

This strategy was not a wise one. It certainly didn’t move Judge Barrett toward leniency. As the New York Times reported,

Barrett scolded Ms. Peters sternly from the bench, telling her he had imposed the severe penalty because she had repeatedly advanced false claims about Mr. Trump’s defeat and in so doing become a celebrity among those who denied that he lost the race.

“But you are no hero, you abused your position and you are a charlatan,” Judge Barrett said, adding, “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”

Judge Barrett said Peters peddled “snake oil” that has been proven wrong over and over. Ultimately, in imposing the sentence, he ruled her a danger to the community and concluded, “You would do it all over again if you could.”

The judge’s entire remarks are worth listening to because they send a powerful message to those who would use their positions to sow doubt and mistrust of our electoral system.

Commentator Ron Filipkowski also made an excellent and rather delicious observation upon learning the news of Peters’s sentencing yesterday.

It is the hope of many election officials, whose lives have been turned upside down and even put at risk because of election conspiracies pushed by the likes of Peters, that her nine-year sentence will act as a significant deterrent. Specifically, they hope that the accountability Peters is finally facing will keep others from engaging in any dangerous illegal behavior in the upcoming election, such as tampering with voting machines. Such actions inflict serious damage upon our democracy and public faith in our systems and processes.

As for Peters, she’ll now have a long time to think about how her life went terribly wrong, all in the service of absurd lies sold to her by fellow chalatans, all to protect a criminal felon ex-president.