June 22, 2022
Contact: Cory Combs, Senior Communications Manager
ccombs@issueoneaction.org, p: 202-204-8553
Colorado Secretary of State candidate Tina Peters is “unfit to oversee elections” says Issue One Action CEO Nick Penniman
Washington, DC – June 22, 2022 – An indicted, election-denying extremist who is barred from overseeing the 2022 elections could emerge next Tuesday as the Republican Party’s nominee for the position of secretary of state in Colorado, the top state official who oversees election administration.
Currently the incumbent clerk and recorder in Mesa County, Colorado, Tina Peters allegedly assisted with a security breach of her own county’s voting machines after the 2020 election as she sought to substantiate unproven fraud claims. She is now one of the leading candidates in Colorado’s GOP secretary of state primary.
After Peters’ alleged involvement in a scheme that secretly copied hard drives from Dominion Voting Systems equipment came to light, a Colorado judge barred Peters from overseeing both the 2021 and 2022 elections in Mesa County.
Peters’ role in this security breach is also being investigated by multiple authorities, including the FBI, Colorado’s secretary of state, and Mesa County’s Republican district attorney, who has convened a grand jury that has indicted her with seven felony charges.
“Elections should be run by dedicated public servants who are committed to administering free and fair elections, not rogue partisan activists who seek to undermine voters’ confidence in the democratic process,” said Issue One Action CEO Nick Penniman.
Penniman continued: “Based on her record and her rhetoric, Tina Peters is unfit to oversee elections. To this day, Tina Peters continues to peddle lies and disinformation about the integrity of our elections. People who do not believe in free and fair elections are unfit for elected office in the United States — especially for the position of secretary of state.”
Election deniers are running to be the next secretary of state in several states this year. While election deniers have been defeated at the ballot box in GOP primaries so far this year in places including Georgia, Idaho, Nebraska, and Ohio, Republicans have also selected election deniers to be their secretary of state nominees in states such as Michigan, Nevada, and New Mexico. Moreover, Pennsylvania Republicans chose an election denier who was present at the January 6th attack on the Capitol to be their gubernatorial nominee.
Tina Peters’ record as an election denier
Peters has long embraced election conspiracy theories, including promoting unsupported claims from Dinesh D’Souza’s “2000 Mules” film. Recently filed campaign finance reports show Peters used campaign money to attend a screening of the film in May at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida.
Tina Peters announced in February 2022 that she would run for secretary of state on the podcast of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who praised her as an “American hero.”
While Peters purports to believe that “targeting political opponents [has] no place in Colorado,” she stood by at a campaign event in April outside the state capitol in Denver as her supporters chanted “lock her up” in reference to her would-be general election opponent, Colorado’s incumbent Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold. At that same event, Peters herself baselessly claimed that voters’ votes frequently don’t matter, asserting that “we’ve got elected officials that are selected, not elected, in this state and in this country.”
Peters has been under investigation for her role in the security breach in Mesa County since August 2021, when data copied from her county’s voting machines showed up online shortly after she spoke at a symposium held by prominent election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow.
After the conference, Lindell allegedly provided Peters with a “safe house” for several weeks while she was under the FBI’s scrutiny for the security breach. She is now facing multiple ethics complaints for allegedly accepting a trip on Lindell’s private plane and other gifts in excess of the state’s gift limits.
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