DENVER — A who’s who of current and former Republican elections officials are criticizing the Colorado Republican Party for its support of indicted former clerk Tina Peters ahead of her felony trial for election system tampering.
An open letter to Colorado Republicans, signed by more than 30 GOP elections officials past and present, calls the state party’s backing of Peters “a slap in the face.”
Peters faces a felony trial for tampering with Mesa County’s voting systems in an unsuccessful search for voter fraud. Peters has admitted to turning over digital copies of the county’s voting systems to fellow election rigging conspiracy theorists.
The Grand Junction Sentinel reported that Peters’ trial was postponed Tuesday, three days before the scheduled start of jury selection, when Peters fired her legal team for the second time.
“Tina Peters is not a hero,” the open letter reads, in part. “We ask our fellow Colorado Republican Party members to support your local Republican Clerk and Recorders, who administer with integrity, an election system that serves our Constitution and every Coloradan casting a ballot.”
Signatories to the letter distributed to Colorado Republicans on Monday and Tuesday include dozens of current and former GOP county clerks, along with five former GOP Colorado Secretaries of State: Mary Estill Buchanan, Mike Coffman, Donetta Davidson, Gigi Dennis, and Wayne Williams.
“Peters did not uncover any fraud or threats to Mesa County elections. In the end, she herself was the threat to election integrity in the county,” their letter reads. “Her actions made elections less secure and more susceptible to nefarious activity.”
“She has since embarked on a national campaign to discredit our elections processes, the same processes she never bothered to understand when she served as a county clerk,” the letter continues. “She has also profited financially and has become quite famous while trying to deflect blame, putting her former staff and others in harm’s way and saddling Mesa County taxpayers with more than one million dollars in expenses to unnecessarily recount election results and replace the voting systems she compromised.”
Peters ran for Colorado Republican Party chair while under indictment, ultimately deciding the contest by throwing her support to eventual chair Dave Williams, who rewarded Peters with the offer of an official party role working on election integrity.
A Feb. 1 email blast to the Colorado Republican Party’s mailing list was titled “The GOP Stands With Tina Peters.”
The email solicited donations for Peters “while she fights the establishment and our corrupt judicial system.”
Peters’ allies quickly attacked the Republican elections officials criticizing the Colorado GOP.
Conservative activist and podcaster Joe Oltmann, who has called for the mass executions of political opponents he has identified as “traitors,” called Peters’ Republican critics “traitor leftist pieces of trash.”
Peters thanked the Colorado Republican Party and Oltmann for their work “calling out the traitors of our elections and our country.”
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