The Ballad Of Tina Peters

Sing it, girl!

“You are no hero,” Judge Matthew Barrett scolded former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters before sentencing her last week for breaching election equipment in search of proof that the 2020 election was stolen. “You are a charlatan and you cannot help but lie as easy as it is for you to breathe. You betrayed your oath for no one other than you.”

On the eve of the 2024 presidential election, we’re still cleaning up the mess Trump and his allies made in the last one. Mesa County was forced to spend $1.4 million replacing its equipment and paying lawyers and extra staff to deal with the fallout from Peters’ breach. The lies she helped spread ginned up a mob that continues to harass election workers, employees at voting machine companies, and public officials, including Judge Barrett himself.

“Meeting this coming week about what we do to hold the corrupt trash judge and the treasonous traitors accountable for what they did to Tina," tweeted her ally Joe Oltmann, a rightwing podcaster who is himself a defendant in a defamation suit filed by a former Dominion employee forced into hiding after Oltmann accused him of being the linchpin of a plan to steal the election.

And under the most generous parole conditions, Peters, who is 68 and claims to have health issues, will be in prison until she’s 72.

It’s an incredible record of destruction, all to prove that there was “fraud” against Donald Trump in a county where he took 63 percent of the vote.

Ignorance Isn’t a Crime, But It Can Sometimes Lead You Into One (Or Several)

Tina Peters had no background in data analytics when she was elected as county clerk in 2018. But she did have a “degree” in “holistic nutrition” from Clayton College of Natural Health, an unaccredited online school which recently closed. (Don’t worry, Dr. Christopher's School of Natural Healing is ready to pick up the slack.)

In office, Peters doesn’t seem to have been particularly interested in improving her skills and failed to even complete the clerk accreditation program, according to Matt Crane, executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, who testified at her sentencing.

“Managing and running an election is complicated. The processes are specific and require great attention to detail,” he told Judge Barrett. “I can assure this court that Tina never even attempted to master any of these processes.”

In fact, she survived a recall petition in early 2020 arising from numerous administrative failures, including the discovery in February 2020 of a box of 524 un-tabulated ballots from the November 2019 election in the parking lot outside her office. And so, Crane suggested, when Trump’s minions went looking for someone willing to both believe a bunch of idiotic lies about election and abuse her office to support them, “They found an easy mark.”

There’s another, less-generous version of the story in which Peters was never duped at all and was in on the con from the jump. According to the New Yorker, Peters rebuffed suggestions that she do a hand recount in 2020 to reassure constituents worried about election security, scoffing that there were “just a few people that are in a frenzy because of what Donald Trump has done.” It was only when four conservatives lost their April 2021 election to city council in Grand Junction that she decided that the machines were to blame.

But whatever her reasoning, Crane was undoubtedly correct when he told the court “It is not possible to overestimate the damage that Tina Peters has done.”