GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — A jury in Grand Junction found former Colorado clerk Tina Peters guilty of seven out of 10 counts, including four felonies, in a security breach of her county’s election computer system.
The jury found Peters guilty on the following charges:
- Three counts of attempt to influence a public servant
- One count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation
- One count of official misconduct
- One count of violation of duty
- One count of failure to comply with secretary of state requirements
Peters was found not guilty on one other count of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, one count of criminal impersonation and one count of identity theft.
She is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 3.
Elected officials across Colorado spoke out after the jury issued its verdict.
“Clerks across the state are pleased to see justice done today," Executive Director of the Colorado County Clerks Association Matt Crane said in a statement." We take seriously our role as guardians of the best election process in the nation and are grateful to see the justice system hold those who would harm our elections accountable.”
“Tina Peters willfully compromised her own election equipment trying to prove Trump’s Big Lie," Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement released shortly after the verdict was delivered. "She has been found guilty by a jury of her peers and will now face the consequences of her actions. Today’s verdict sends a clear message: we will not tolerate any effort to threaten the security of our gold standard elections. I am proud that justice for Colorado voters has been served today."
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser also released a statement following the verdict.
“Today’s verdict is a warning to others that they will face serious consequences if they attempt to illegally tamper with our voting processes or election systems," Weiser said. "I want to be clear—our elections are safe and fair. In fact, Colorado’s election system is the gold standard of the nation. And make no mistake: my office will continue to protect it.”
Mesa County District Attorney Daniel Rubinstein also weighed in on the verdict.
"This community has suffered greatly from the dishonesty, lack of transparency and refusal of Ms. Peters to take accountability," Rubinstein said in a statement. "Our system of government is based upon checks and balances, and no single elected official, or even branch of government, is above the law or should be allowed to act without those checks and balances."
Prosecutors told the jury Monday Peters deceived government employees so she could work with outsiders affiliated with MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell, one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists, to become famous.
In closing arguments at Peters' trial, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the former clerk allowed a man posing as a county employee to take images 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 were manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump.
“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage,” said Drake, a lawyer from the Colorado Attorney General's Office.
Drake has been working for the district attorney in Mesa County, a largely Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.
Before jurors began deliberations, the defense told them that Peters had not committed any crimes and only wanted to preserve election records after the county would not allow her to have one of its technology experts present at the software update.
Defense lawyer John Case said Peters had to preserve records to access the voting system to find out things like whether anyone from “China or Canada” had accessed the machine while ballots were being counted.
“And thank God she did. Otherwise we really wouldn’t know what happened,” he said.
Peters allowed a former surfer affiliated with Lindell, Conan Hayes, to 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 theft by taking Wood's security badge and giving it to Hayes to conceal his identity, the defense says Wood was in on the scheme so Peters did not commit a crime by doing that.
Wood denied that when he testified during the trial.
Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who helped introduce Peters to people working with Lindell, testified that Wood knew his identity would be used based on a Signal chat between her, Wood and Peters. No agreement was spelled out in the chat.
The day after the first image of the hard drive was taken, Bishop testified that she posted a voice recording in the chat. The content of that recording was not included in screenshots of the chat introduced by the defense. The person identified as Wood responded to that unknown message by saying “I was glad to help out. I do hope the effort proved fruitful," according to the screenshots.
Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told jurors that Bishop was not credible.
Peters’ case was the first instance amid the 2020 conspiracy theories in which a local election official was charged with a suspected security breach of voting systems. It heightened concerns nationally for the potential of insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to lies about the 2020 election might use their access to election equipment and the knowledge gained through the breaches to launch an attack from within.