FILE - Tina Peters, former Mesa County, Colo., clerk, listens during her trial, March 3, 2023, in Grand Junction, Colo. (Scott Crabtree/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP, Pool, File)
DENVER (AP) –
Former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, a hero to election deniers, has been found guilty in a breach of her county’s election computer system in a jury verdict returned Monday at trial.
Peters was accused of using someone else’s security badge to give an expert affiliated with My Pillow chief executive Mike Lindell access to the Mesa County election system. Prosecutors said she was seeking fame and became “fixated” on voting problems after becoming involved with those who had questioned the accuracy of the 2020 presidential election results.
The case marked the first prosecution of a local election official over a suspected security breach amid the conspiracy theories that swirled around the 2020 election. It heightened concerns over potential insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to partisan lies could use their access and knowledge to launch an attack from within.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
DENVER (AP) – Prosecutors on Monday urged jurors to convict former Colorado clerk Tina Peters in a security breach of her county’s election computer system, saying she 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 Tina 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 is charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, one count of identity theft, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.
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.
