Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, hero to election deniers, convicted in election computer breach
DENVER — Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, was found guilty by a jury Monday on most charges stemming from a breach of her county’s elections computer system.
Peters was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert connected to My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell access to Mesa County’s voting system. Prosecutors said she was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting issues after becoming involved with people who questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The case marked the first prosecution of a local election official for a suspected security breach amid conspiracy theories swirling around the 2020 election. It heightened concerns about potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from the inside.
Peters was convicted of three counts: attempted influence over a public servant, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, misconduct of a public servant in the first degree, neglect of duty and failure to comply with the directives of the Secretary of State.
She was acquitted of one count of identity fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit criminal identity fraud, and one count of criminal identity fraud.
The verdict came hours after prosecutors called on the jury to convict Peters, alleging she misled government officials into colluding with outsiders with ties to Lindell, one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists.
In closing process Prosecutor Janet Drake alleges the former clerk allowed a man posing as a county employee to take photos of the election system’s hard drive before and after a software upgrade in May 2021.
Drake said Peters observed the update so she could become the “hero” and appear at Lindell’s symposium on the 2020 presidential election a few months later. Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines are rigged to steal election from Donald Trump.
“The defendant was a fox guarding the hen house. Her job was to protect the election equipment, and she turned it on and used her power for her own benefit,” said Drake, an attorney with the Colorado attorney general’s office.
Drake works for the district attorney in Mesa County, a predominantly Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.
Before jurors began their deliberations Monday, the defense told them that Peters had committed no crimes and only wanted to preserve the election data after the county refused to allow one of its technology experts to be present for the software update.
Defense attorney John Case said Peters needed to preserve data to access the voting system to determine, for example, whether someone from “China or Canada” had access to the machine while ballots were being counted.
“And thank God she did. Otherwise we really wouldn’t know what happened,” he said.
Peters had a former surfer with ties to Lindell, Conan Hayes, observe the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of a local man, Gerald Wood, who Peters said worked for her. But while prosecutors say Peters committed identity fraud by taking Wood’s security badge and giving it to Hayes to hide his identity, the defense says Wood was in on the scheme and that Peters therefore committed no crime.
Wood denied this when he testified at trial.
Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who helped Peters meet people who worked with Lindell, testified that Wood knew his identity would be used based on a Signal chat between her, Wood and Peters. No agreement was made in the chat.
The day after the first image of the hard drive was taken, Bishop testified that she had posted a voice recording in the chat. The contents of that recording were not included in screenshots of the chat submitted by the defense. The person identified as Wood responded to that unidentified message by saying, “I was happy to help. I hope the effort was fruitful,” according to the screenshots.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told the jury that Bishop was not credible.