It’s been nearly a month since sensitive data about voting equipment in Colorado’s Mesa County was posted online by conspiracy theorists eager to cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election.
At the center of the criminal investigation into how that information was released is county clerk Tina Peters, whose whereabouts remain unknown. She hasn’t returned to work in Mesa County since the data breach was announced.
The FBI is also investigating the case.
One reason why the Mesa County security breach is particularly significant is because it uses equipment from Dominion Voting Systems, one of the country’s biggest vendors of election equipment. The company is also at the center of many of the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that claim the ballot counting was somehow rigged against former President Donald Trump. (Dominion is pursuing a number of defamation suits against both pro-Trump news outlets and Trump advisers over the conspiracy theories.)
While most election officials around the country have spent the better part of the last year and a half fighting conspiracy theories spouted by Trump and his allies, Peters seemed to embrace the falsehoods and fueled them.
Just as state officials announced a probe, Peters was attending and speaking at a conference hosted by Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, that pushed more falsehoods about the 2020 election.
“I’ve listened to people. I looked at it objectively and there’s some discrepancies there that I cannot deny. And I tell people, I say, ‘I can’t unsee some of these things,’ ” Peters told attendees at the conference.
‘She needs to come back to work’
Peters is being sheltered by Lindell, a serial promoter of false election fraud claims. He says Peters fears for her safety if she returns home.
Local county commissioners say Peters needs to return to oversee the other parts of her job and the staff.
“She’s in hiding by her own admission,” said Commissioner Scott Mcinnis, who like Peters is a Republican.
“We want to make sure we take the threats against her very, very seriously. We want to make sure she’s protected, but she needs to come back to work.”
First elected in 2018, Peters’ tenure as the top local election official in her rural, western Colorado county has occasionally been controversial. In February 2020, her office admitted to finding 574 uncounted ballots from a 2019 election, leading to a state probe and calls for her resignation.
The problems at the clerk’s office extend beyond Peters. On Thursday her deputy, Belinda Knisley, was charged with second-degree burglary and a cybercrime for entering the building while she was suspended, pending an investigation for unprofessional and inappropriate conduct in the workplace.
Earlier this week, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold filed a lawsuit to officially prevent Peters from having any role in the county’s upcoming fall election.
Mesa County is a conservative area where voters strongly backed Trump last fall….
Read More: Voting Data From A Colorado County Was Leaked Online. Now, The Clerk