Trial begins for Colorado activist over 2020 voting data breach

Tina Peters, a former local Colorado election clerk, will face trial starting Wednesday on charges related to alleged tampering with voting machines and leaking confidential data following the 2020 election.

Peters, a former Mesa County clerk-turned-activist who maintains that she had legitimate concerns about the way the county’s 2020 general election was conducted, was indicted by a grand jury in March 2022. She has denied wrongdoing and stands accused of three felony counts of attempting to influence a public servant, four felony counts related to impersonation and identity theft, and three misdemeanor counts for official misconduct.

Jury selection is slated to begin Wednesday and could last up to two days. The entirety of the trial is expected to last around eight days, according to District Judge Matthew Barrett, who is overseeing the case, the Daily Sentinel reported.

Prosecutors claim Peters instructed her deputy clerk to turn off security cameras in May 2021 and facilitated an unauthorized person to observe and photograph a voting machine update.

Peters, who says she acted out of concerns over whether she could trust the Dominion Voting Systems machines in her county, allegedly sent data and passwords to a Florida company, which posted the information online. In a report published in September 2021, an independent cybersecurity firm said it found unusual activity and evidence of deleted voting records.

A subsequent investigation by Colorado 21st District Attorney Daniel Rubinstein found no evidence of coordinated election fraud, but discovered several instances of human error, and found that the omitted records that the private security firm highlighted were not related to the election results.

The security breach caused Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, to decertify voting machines, costing Mesa County over $96,000 for replacements. Peters was later removed from overseeing elections after a lawsuit by Griswold succeeded.

The trial, originally slated for March 2023, has long been delayed and has likewise drawn attention to the broader concern of election security and the possible influence of individuals skeptical of the 2020 election results who held state positions.

Peters has suggested her goal in the trial is to make it less about her alleged actions but instead about her election integrity concerns surrounding the Dominion election equipment used in her county. However, U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya, who is overseeing an open defamation case in Washington, D.C., ruled Monday that documents and discovery in that federal case cannot be shared in Peters’s trial “absent express Court order.”

Colorado has since passed the Internal Election Security Measures Act to prevent similar incidents. Despite Peters’s legal challenges, she maintains that she is being persecuted and has garnered support from like-minded individuals, including financial backing for her legal defense from MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne.

Peters previously filed a lawsuit in federal district court in an attempt to halt the criminal trial, and a judge dismissed that suit in January, though Peters is appealing. She also recently sought relief from the Supreme Court to halt her trial, though Justice Neil Gorsuch rejected that effort on July 22.

The former Mesa County Clerk has also been living under home confinement and wearing an ankle monitor after she was sentenced last year in a case that found her guilty of obstructing the government when she attempted to withhold an iPad she used to record a court proceeding, according to the outlet.

Opening statements in the case could begin as early as Thursday or Friday after a jury is seated.

The Washington Examiner contacted Peters and her attorney for comment.