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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. — Just six weeks before the 2020 presidential election — game day for vote-counting bureaucrats — Tina Peters was so proud of her operation at the Mesa County clerk’s office that she invited a film crew in to show it off. There’s no chance of mishap here, she boasted.
“The Russians can’t hack into and start casting votes for someone,” she said, as a few in the office chuckled.
By May 2021, it was Ms. Peters, not the Russians, who had helped engineer an audacious breach of voting machines, according to an indictment charging her with seven felonies. Ms. Peters arranged to copy sensitive election software from county voting machines in an attempt to prove the 2020 presidential election was rigged, according to court records. Prosecutors said she committed identity theft and criminal impersonation, and violated the duties of her office in the process. Ms. Peters has pleaded not guilty.
The strange tale of Tina Peters — a once-ordinary public servant consumed by conspiracy theories and catapulted to minor stardom by believers — will take its next twist on Tuesday, when voters decide whether to make the indicted public official the Republican nominee for secretary of state, the top election official in Colorado. Polls are sparse in the primary race, but Ms. Peters is considered a contender.
Ms. Peters did not just stumble into the world of election conspiracy theories. A review of public statements and interviews with people involved in her case showed she was repeatedly assisted by a loose network of election deniers, some of whom worked alongside Donald J. Trump’s legal team to try to subvert the presidential election in 2020. They are still working to undermine confidence in elections today.
That network’s involvement is just one of several bizarre plot points in Ms. Peters’s case. The Mesa County breach involved a former surfer who was dressed as a computer “nerd” and made a FaceTime call during the operation, reporting by The New York Times shows. Afterward, the crew shared their loot — images of voting machine data — at a conference streamed online, advertising the effort to thousands. On Friday, Ms. Peters told The Times that her congresswoman, Representative Lauren Boebert, “encouraged me to go forward with the imaging.”
A press officer for Ms. Boebert, a Republican, called the claim false.
Through it all, Ms. Peters has parlayed the episode into a national political profile on the right, speaking at events across the country where she is celebrated as a hero. Influential election deniers have come to her aid: Mike Lindell, the MyPillow executive who supports a stable of lawyers and researchers promoting bogus theories, says he has funneled as much as $200,000 to Ms. Peters’s legal defense. Others, including Patrick Byrne, a former Overstock executive, have run ads attacking her primary opponent.
In a statement to The Times, Ms. Peters declined to answer specific questions about the episode, citing pending litigation. In September, before Ms. Peters was indicted, her lawyer acknowledged that she had allowed “one non-employee” to copy hard drives, but argued that there was no rule or regulation against it, something the secretary of state’s office disputes.
In public appearances since, Ms. Peters has said she made the copies because she worried the voting machine company was going to delete computer systems that recorded the 2020 election and wanted to preserve records. She has been less forthcoming about how the material ended up online.
“The people want to know HOW our elections have been turned over to machines with no oversight, transparency or real security in any meaningful way,” Ms. Peters said in the statement.
Materials released in the Mesa County breach have been used to fuel the churn of misinformation about President Biden’s victory. Election experts say the episode…
Read More: The Election Conspiracy Theories Driving Tina Peters to Run in Colorado