Mesa County Clerk and Recorder, Tina Peters, has been in a tough, ongoing battle with state and federal officials over the 2020 election since she and an "unidentified man" made a backup copy of images from Dominion Voting Systems vote-counting equipment. Peters says she has done nothing wrong, and it was well within her scope of responsibilities to back up the election records. In fact, in an interview with Steve Bannon on March 22, Peters said that "the backup that she did was lawful and required by federal and state law. It has no PII or Personal Identifiable Information of voters."
Notably, in tandem with her case, Colorado Democrats are trying to make it illegal to create images of voting machine hard drives without state permission. In a written statement on March 21, Peters states that the Bill amounts to an "elections power grab." The Bill "violates six federal election laws plus the First Amendment. It violates five or more Colorado state statutes governing election laws," she continued.
The comprehensive proposed legislation called the Colorado Election Security Act (CESA), or SB22-153, would "enable the secretary of state to sue clerks when the secretary lacks the support of local electors." The law would also "add more training requirements for election staff and officials" and "mandate full-time video monitoring of equipment and increase penalties for security breaches." According to NPR, current law says that cameras only have to be on "for a set number of days around each election, and only on certain pieces of election equipment."
History of the Tina Peters Case
Allegedly Peters and an individual entered a secure area to attend a software update and make the backup. The Colorado Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, filed a lawsuit in August, seeking to remove Peters from office, saying Peters "is not fit to serve." The issue came to her attention when a Mesa County voting system password was revealed on Telegram.
"The posted images depict the BIOS passwords specific to the individual hardware stations of Mesa County's voting system. These passwords can only be used physically at a voting system at the Mesa County Clerk's Office."
Peters and her Deputy Clerk, Belinda Knisley, were indicted by a Grand Jury on March 9. According to CPR news:
Peters faces 10 total counts, including seven felony charges and three misdemeanors. The felony charges include attempting to influence a public servant, identity theft, criminal impersonation and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. The misdemeanors include first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failure to comply with the requirements of the Secretary of State.
Knisley has been indicted on six counts: attempt to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty, and failure to comply with the requirements of the Secretary of State.
Three Comprehensive Forensic Election Reports
Peters, who was released on bond on March 10 after spending just over 24 hours in the Mesa County Detention Facility, says her "trifecta of reports" vindicates her allegations of malfeasance and fraud in the 2020 election. She maintains that votes were manipulated in the 2020 General Election in Colorado, among other claims.
According to Peters, forensic Report One shows that "29k access logs and adjudication logs were erased, a violation of state and federal law." Forensic Report Two shows that "36 wireless devices were in the equipment and, by law," she continued, "These machines not only cannot be connected to the internet, they cannot have the capability of being connected to the internet." And Report Three "actually shows manipulation of the votes."
For example, concerning the manipulation of votes, the 87-page Mesa Forensic Report Three allegedly claims that there was "unauthorized creation of new election databases during early voting in the 2020 General Election on October 21, 2020, followed by the digital reloading of 20,346 ballot records into the new election databases, making the original voter intent recorded from the ballots unknown. In addition, 5,567 ballots in 58 batches did not have their digital records copied to the new database, although the votes from the ballots in those batches were recorded in the Main election database."
209 out of the original 267 batches containing the 20,346 ballots were "digitally, not physically loaded into the new Adjudication and Tabulation databases," per the report. Only selected batches of ballots were copied, "indicating this was an intentional act."
Mesa Forensic Report Three/Tina Peters
There were numerous instances of manipulation cited in the report. In the case mentioned above, the manipulation seems to coinside with what happened in real-time on that day as well. Shortly after 2:34, some Mesa County Adjudication Officials "were being asked to look at ballots that they had already adjudicated. This is consistent with these ballots and batches being reprocessed in the new Adjudication database."
The three reports, 316 pages in total, provide evidence similar in pattern to evidence found during Maricopa County's forensic audit. Patrick Byrne alludes to it in the following video:
The reports include evidence of wireless access, the ability for anyone with access to change vote totals by computer or cellphone, database edits, remote changes to data, security issues with the Microsoft SQL Server, log files that were allegedly not preserved and were allegedly overwritten, and "uncertified software was installed, rendering the voting system unlawful for use in elections." The above are only a fraction of the allegations documented in the three reports.
Mesa County Report Number 2/Tina Peters
The three reports are "a meticulous," and careful study of information from the machines showing the system was "illegal" and should have never been used to count the peoples' votes, says Peters.
Peters is currently running for Secretary of State against Griswold. "On the day that Peters announced her run, Griswold tweeted that Peters is "unfit" for office because she "compromised voting equipment" and "embraces conspiracies."
