Colorado

Colorado county clerks from both parties feel abandoned by Governor for letting felon Peters out of jail early | David O. Williams/The Aspen Times

Gov. Jared Polis thinks his decision to commute the prison sentence of 2020 election denier, convicted felon and former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters will someday be viewed in the same light as former Beaver Creek resident and President Gerald Ford’s pardon of President Richard Nixon: An act of national “reconciliation and healing.” For many Democrats and some Republicans in Colorado, that day will never arrive. While his own party calls for the censure or even impeachment of Polis for essentially ending Peters’ nearly nine-year sentence for breaching her own election systems in support of President Donald Trump’s widely debunked 2020 election claims, current and former Colorado clerks from both sides of the aisle say something much larger than the governor’s legacy is at stake. “We are furious, disgusted, and deeply disappointed by the Governor’s decision,” the Colorado County Clerk’s Association (CCCA) wrote in a statement. “At a time when election officials need strong support, this decision abandons them and supports the attack on the legitimacy of American elections.” County clerks from both parties feel abandoned by Polis for letting felon Peters out of jail early | AspenTimes.com

Colorado: Appeals court declines to rehear Tina Peters’ arguments | Tom Hesse/CPR

A three-judge panel of the Court of Appeals will not take a second crack at Tina Peters’ appeal despite a request from her attorney asking for more consideration of some of their arguments. Peters’ attorneys requested the rehearing on April 16, two weeks after the Court of Appeals ordered a re-sentencing for the former Mesa County Clerk on the grounds that the trial judge, 21st Judicial District Court Judge Matthew Barrett, had improperly considered Peters’ public comments and may have violated her First Amendment right to free speech. Today, the Court of Appeals rejected that rehearing request. In their request for a rehearing, Peters’ attorneys argued that the Court of Appeals “misapprehended” their arguments on the supremacy clause. Peters has long maintained that she was acting in a federal capacity when she permitted unauthorized access to county voting equipment and, therefore, should be immune from state charges. Thus far, no court has sided with Peters’ claims. Read Article

Colorado court orders resentencing for former county clerk Tina Peters | Colleen Slevin and Matthew Brown/Associated Press

A Colorado appeals court ruled Thursday that a former county clerk convicted in a scheme that sought to prove fraud in the 2020 presidential election should be resentenced because a judge wrongly punished her for statements protected as free speech. Tina Peters is serving a nine-year prison term after being convicted of state crimes for sneaking in an outside computer expert to make a copy of her county’s election computer system during a software update in 2021. A photo and video of confidential voting system passwords were later posted on social media and a conservative website. Calls for Peters’ release have become a cause celebre in the election conspiracy movement. President Donald Trump has sought unsuccessfully to pardon Peters and pressured Colorado to set her free. Read Article

Colorado: Tech glitches disrupt Democrats as they consider primary candidates | Rae Solomon and Caitlyn Kim/CPR

Over the last two weekends, Colorado Democrats held caucus meetings to help decide who will be on the primary ballot in June, but the meetings were beset with technical difficulties that have led to confusion and consternation from some who attended and concerns about whether delegates lost their voice in the process. In previous years, the process has run on paper ballots and in-person voting. This year was the first time the Party introduced voting by app. Delegates described using Airtable, a business workflow app that is not designed to run elections, to register their votes. The software struggled to handle the high volume of users throughout the process, and finally crashed toward the end of the day on March 14. “People are getting pretty tired and upset at that point in time,” said State House District 6 candidate Iris Halpern, who is hoping to serve as a delegate in several statewide races at the party convention in Pueblo later this month. “I think most people tried to be patient and stick with it. But I'm pretty sure we probably did lose some folks throughout the day.” Read Article

Colorado Governor Signals He’ll Commute Sentence of Election Denier | By Jack Healy, Nick Corasaniti and Alan Feuer/The New York Times

Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado offered the clearest signal yet late on Tuesday that he might commute the nine-year sentence of Tina Peters, the last high-profile Trump ally still in prison for crimes stemming from President Trump’s 2020 election loss. Mr. Trump has waged an all-out assault on Colorado while pressuring Mr. Polis, a Democrat, to free Ms. Peters. He has blocked hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money from the Democratic-led state, moved the headquarters of U.S. Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama, promised to shutter a federal atmospheric research center in Boulder and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado. Commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence now might appease Mr. Trump and stop those attacks, but it would set off a furious backlash among Democrats and imperil Mr. Polis’s political future. Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Colorado have spent months urging the governor to resist the pressure from Mr. Trump. But on Tuesday night Mr. Polis wrote a social-media post that suggested he believed that Ms. Peters, a Republican former county clerk, had received too harsh a sentence when she was convicted of tampering with voting machines in a failed effort to show that the 2020 vote had been rigged against Mr. Trump. Read Article

Colorado secretary of state says feds have ‘lost credibility’ on elections after FBI call  | Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline

Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said President Donald Trump’s administration has “lost credibility” on election security issues after a Wednesday call between top state elections officials and federal law enforcement agencies. Griswold, a Democrat who is also a 2026 candidate for Colorado attorney general, echoed concerns from other Democratic secretaries of state over what they characterized as administration officials’ refusal to acknowledge states’ constitutional role in overseeing U.S. elections. Staff from Griswold’s office participated in the call, which was organized earlier this month by FBI election executive Kellie Hardiman. It included representatives from the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Postal Inspection Service and Election Assistance Commission. “Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot of confidence or trust at this point with previously important federal relationships,” Griswold said. Read Article

Colorado appeals panel skeptical of former election clerk’s sentencing | Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

A Colorado appeals panel on Wednesday seemed skeptical that a judge could use former county clerk Tina Peters’ insistence on spreading election conspiracy theories as part of the reason to sentence her to nine years in prison for orchestrating a data breach of election equipment. The three-judge panel was dismissive of many of the arguments made by Peters’ attorneys. But they grilled the state’s lawyer over the trial judge reciting Peters’ false statements about elections in handing down her sentence. “The court cannot punish her for her First Amendment rights,” Appeals Judge Craig Welling said. The remarks are significant because President Donald Trump has embraced Peters, who was trying to find evidence of the fraud that he continues to claim, without evidence, caused him to lose the 2020 presidential election. He’s threatened Colorado with “harsh measures” if it does not release her and even issued a pardon of her last month, although she was convicted on state crimes that he cannot erase. Read Article

The Last MAGA Prisoner | Yvonne Wingett Sanchez/The Atlantic

Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated. But even a president obsessed with retribution, who granted blanket clemency to people convicted of federal offenses connected to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, can’t erase Peters’s sentence. Her state-level conviction is beyond the reach of his federal pardon power. And so she sits in a Colorado prison, the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars. The sprawling campaign to “Free Tina Peters” is testing Colorado’s authority to enforce its own laws without interference from a federal government that wants to undo a conviction handed down by a jury. Trump—aided by the Justice Department, the Bureau of Prisons, White House counsel, and MAGA activists—is seeking to unravel her punishment in multiple ways, with the hope that one might work: a transfer into federal custody, a full pardon, or a release before the end of her sentence. Read Article

Colorado Officials Reject Trump’s ‘Pardon’ of a Convicted Election Denier | Jack Healy/The New York Times

President Trump’s pledge to pardon Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines, touched off a new battle on Friday over the fate of perhaps the last high-profile 2020 election denier still behind bars. Democratic leaders in Colorado dismissed the pardon as an empty attempt to bully a Democratic state into freeing one of the president’s political allies. They argued that Mr. Trump had no legal power to overturn Ms. Peters’s conviction in state court. Ms. Peters, the former clerk in conservative-leaning Mesa County, a ranching and oil-and-gas region on the western edge of the state, was sentenced to nine years in prison last year after being found guilty of interfering with voting machines in an effort to prove falsehoods that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against Mr. Trump. Read Article

Colorado: Federal judge declines to release Tina Peters, the only Trump ally in prison for 2020 election-related crimes | Marshall Cohen/CNN Politics

A federal judge on Monday refused to release from prison former Colorado clerk Tina Peters, the only ally of President Donald Trump currently behind bars for crimes related to the attempts to overturn the 2020 election. Last year, a state jury convicted Peters, the former Republican clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, of participating in a criminal scheme with fellow election deniers to breach her county’s secure voting systems, in hopes of proving Trump’s false claims of massive fraud. Trump has championed the case of Peters, 70, who is now one year into a nine-year prison sentence, calling her an “innocent political prisoner.” CNN recently reported that Trump is being strongly encouraged to more aggressively intervene in the matter, to try to get her out of prison. FRead Article

Colorado governor’s office affirms rejection of Tina Peters transfer request | Quentin Young/Colorado Newsline

The office of Colorado Gov. Jared Polis affirmed this week a decision by state prison officials not to fulfill a request by the Trump administration to transfer custody of Tina Peters from the state to federal authorities. Peters, the former Republican Mesa County clerk, is serving a 9-year prison sentence for her role in a scheme to breach the security of her own election equipment. President Donald Trump has repeatedly demanded that she be released. The director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons sent a letter to the Colorado Department of Corrections last month requesting that the state “initiate the transfer” of Peters to the bureau. Read Article

Colorado: Trump administration moves to take custody of imprisoned elections clerk Tina Peters | Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

The Trump administration is seeking a transfer from state prison to federal custody of a former Colorado county clerk who has become a hero to election conspiracy theorists, the state and one of her lawyers said Friday. The Colorado Department of Corrections said Friday that it received a letter from the federal Bureau of Prisons regarding Tina Peters on Wednesday. Neither the department nor the Bureau of Prisons immediately responded to a request to provide a copy of the letter but a corrections department spokesperson, Alondra Gonzalez, confirmed the letter was a request to move Peters to federal custody. A member of Peters’ legal team, Peter Ticktin, said he had seen the letter and also described it as a request to move her to a federal prison to serve out her sentence there. “It is not to have her released,” he said. Read Article

Colorado says relocation of Space Command to Alabama is ‘punishment’ for mail-in voting | Matthew Brown/Associated Press

Colorado officials filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming the relocation of U.S. Space Command to Alabama was illegally motivated by President Donald Trump’s desire to punish Colorado for its mail-in voting system. The litigation announced by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser asks a federal judge to block the move as unconstitutional. Trump chose Huntsville, Alabama, to house Space Command during the closing days of his first term. But in 2023, then-President Joe Biden announced the command would be permanently located in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which had been serving as its temporary headquarters. Trump in September said Colorado’s mail-in voting system “played a big factor” in moving the headquarters to Alabama. Read Article

Colorado election officials say they don’t expect big changes after sudden sale of Dominion Voting Systems | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

The announcement last week that a former Republican election official had purchased Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems and given it the new name Liberty Vote took many county clerks in the state by surprise. Unaffiliated clerk Tiffany Lee from La Plata County in southwest Colorado said she had no advance warning about the sale from Dominion or Liberty Vote. “There was no notification to us that this was even a conversation at their level,” said Lee. Like other clerks she found out through the media and Liberty Vote’s press release. “That's concerning to me that we didn't get any kind of information from them directly or Dominion,” she said. Reasd Article

Colorado attorney general says Tina Peters’ First Amendment appeals claims are wrong | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

The Colorado Attorney General’s office has formally responded to claims from former Republican Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters that the state court is trying to keep her from speaking out on election security, in violation of her First Amendment rights, and has unjustly denied her bond while she appeals her conviction on charges related to handling election equipment. Peters is currently incarcerated at the La Vista Correctional Facility, a medium-security facility for women located in Pueblo. In 2024, a state judge in Grand Junction sentenced Peters to nine years in prison when she was found guilty of several felony charges stemming from her efforts to help a man gain unauthorized access to Mesa County’s Dominion voting machines in 2021. Read Article

Colorado officials from both parties push back on Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting | Western Colorado | Nathan Deal/Grand Junction Sentinel

At the start of September, President Donald Trump announced the relocation of Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama, seeing through his original plan from early 2021 in his first term. In the Oval Office, Trump made it clear that one of the reasons Colorado would be losing Space Command is its mail-in voting system. In light of Trump’s remarks, The Daily Sentinel contacted political figures on both sides of the spectrum for their response to the president’s criticism of Colorado’s elections. The responses were unanimous in defending the state. Read Article

Colorado: Trump says he’s moving Space Command HQ to Alabama because of Colorado’s mail-in voting system | Rebecca Shabad/NBC

President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that U.S. Space Command's headquarters will move to Alabama from Colorado, reversing a Biden administration decision. In remarks at the White House, Trump said he was making the shift in part because of Colorado's use of mail-in voting. "The problem I have with Colorado, one of the big problems, they do mail-in voting, they went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections," Trump said in the Oval Office. Colorado allows for in-person elections, but every voter automatically receives a ballot in the mail. According to Colorado's secretary of state, about 92% of the ballots cast in last November's election were a mail ballot, with about 8% voting in person. Read Article

Colorado: Trump again calls for release of ex-clerk guilty of election data breach | Rachel Leingang/The Guardian

Donald Trump again called for the release of a former election clerk in Colorado who was convicted for her role in breaching election data in a quest to find fraud, threatening he would take “harsh measures” if she was not let out of prison. Peters was charged for allowing access to county voting equipment by an outside election activist, who was given security credentials under a different name. Materials and passwords were then published online on Telegram and on the rightwing outlet the Gateway Pundit. She was found guilty by a jury in Mesa county in 2024 of seven counts related to misconduct, conspiracy and impersonation, four of which were felony charges. She was sentenced later that year to nine years in prison. Her attorneys had argued for probation instead of prison time. Read Article

Colorado: Longtime critic of voting machines charged in firebomb attack | Christina A. Cassidy and Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

A longtime critic of voting machines and local government has been charged with arson for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail-like device into the office holding the voting equipment in his Colorado mountain community. William Wayne Bryant, in a brief court appearance Wednesday, was advised of the charges presented against him in the June 12 firebombing of a county building in Pagosa Springs. The overnight attack sparked a fire that damaged Dominion Voting Systems equipment in the county clerk’s office and damaged the assessor’s office upstairs, police said. Court documents show Bryant faces two counts of arson and one count of using an explosive or incendiary device. Read Article

Colorado: Consultant, claiming White House backing, called clerks to gain access to voting machines | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

A consultant claiming to work for the White House called several Republican county clerks in Colorado last week, seeking “third-party” access to secure voting equipment, election officials told The Denver Post. At least 10 Republican clerks were contacted by consultant Jeff Small, officials said Wednesday. Small, who has Colorado political connections, told the clerks that he was working on the project for the White House and the U.S. departments of Justice and Homeland Security, and he said he wanted the clerks to let an outside party access voting equipment to identify “gaps.” He also requested access because President Donald Trump’s administration was frustrated with the slow rollout of an executive order issued earlier this year. Trump’s order sought greater federal control over elections, though a federal court last month blocked it. Read Article

Colorado Supreme Court committee advances election-related change, goes back to work on magistrate rules | Michael Karlik/Colorado Politics

The Colorado Supreme Court's civil rules committee approved a procedural change for court challenges to presidential electors, a move that complies with legislation passed this year. The committee also heard from the Supreme Court that it must perform further work on proposed changes to the rules governing magistrates, after the justices heard criticism from some judges and attorneys this week. State lawmakers enacted Senate Bill 210 during the 2024 legislative session, addressing a wide range of elections topics. One provision added new language for legal challenges to presidential electors, requiring filings in the Supreme Court within 24 days of Election Day and obligating the court to prioritize such challenges "over all regular business." Read Article

National: Jury finds MyPillow founder defamed former employee for a leading voting equipment company | Colleen Ylevin/Associated Press

A federal jury in Colorado on Monday found that one of the nation’s most prominent election conspiracy theorists, MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, defamed a former employee for a leading voting equipment company after the 2020 presidential election. The jury found that two of Lindell’s statements about Eric Coomer, the former security and product strategy director at Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems, including calling him a traitor, were defamatory. It ordered Lindell and his online media platform, formerly known as Frankspeech, to pay Coomer $2.3 million in damages, far less than the $62.7 million Coomer had asked for to help send a message to discourage attacks on election workers. “This is hurting democracy. This is misinformation. It’s not been vetted and it needs to stop,” Charles Cain, one of Coomer’s attorneys, told jurors in closing arguments Friday. Read Aerticle

Colorado election officials react to federal request for voter data, eye political motives | Tom Hesse and Anthony Cotton/Colorado Public Radio

An expansive request for Colorado’s election records by the U.S. Department of Justice has leading election officials in the state wondering if the ask might be the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of a former Mesa County Clerk now incarcerated at La Vista Correctional Facility. The letter, first reported by NPR, was sent to Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold in May and requested all election records relating to the state’s 2024 federal contests, under a provision of the Voting Rights Act. Griswold told Colorado Public Radio she thinks this has less to do with the events of November and more to do with October, when former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years incarceration for her role in allowing unauthorized access to county voting equipment. Read Article

Colorado: Trump’s DOJ makes its most sweeping demand for election data yet | Miles Parks and Jude Joffe-Block/NPR

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding an unprecedented amount of election data from at least one state, according to documents obtained by NPR, as the DOJ transformed by the Trump administration reviews cases targeting the president's political allies and caters to his desire to exert more power over state voting processes. On May 12, the Justice Department asked Colorado's secretary of state to turn over "all records" relating to 2024 federal elections, as well as preserve any records that remain from the 2020 election — a sprawling request several voting experts and officials told NPR was highly unusual and concerning, given President Trump's false claims about elections. "What they're going to do with all this data, I don't know," said Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat. "But I'm sure they will use it to push their ridiculous disinformation and lies to the American public." Read Article

Colorado Attorney General says Trump administration cannot free former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters | Anthony Cotton/Colorado Public Radio

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said Wednesday that the federal government has no standing to free former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters from jail. “We have our own system,” Weiser said in an interview with Colorado Matters. “This is what our constitution calls federalism. We enforce our criminal laws and the federal government can't hijack that system. They have to honor it. We are a separate sovereign.” Peters was found guilty last August by a jury of Mesa County residents on seven counts, including four felonies, after she helped facilitate unauthorized access to county voting equipment that she was supposed to safeguard in search of voter fraud. She was sentenced to nine years in prison. Read Article

Colorado: Trump calls for former county clerk Tina Peters to be released from prison | Katie Langford/The Denver Post

President Donald Trump on Monday called for former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters to be released from prison, where she is serving a nine-year sentence for a voting data scheme related to the 2020 presidential election. Peters is a “political prisoner” and “hostage,” Trump said in a Monday night post on Truth Social, describing her case as “communist persecution by the radical left Democrats.” Peters’ case was prosecuted by a Republican district attorney and she was convicted of several felonies related to unauthorized access to state voting machines, including giving a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell so the man could access Mesa County’s election system in an unsuccessful search for voter fraud. Read Article

Colorado lawmakers approve voting rights bill, despite pushback from election officials | Chas Sisk/Aspen Public Radio

Colorado lawmakers are sending the governor a measure meant to shore up voting rights. The move is part of a national effort to write protections established by the federal Voting Rights Act into state laws. But it comes despite opposition from local officials, who have argued the law could upend decades-old practices. Backers cite the gradual weakening of the Voting Rights Act and recent attacks from the Trump administration on state voting laws to argue that there's a need for state legislation. But pushback has come from local officials, including some representing progressive parts of the state. They say the measure could reopen settled legal questions about voting practices that some could argue are discriminatory. Those include electing officials at large, which can keep minority candidates out of office, and holding local elections in the spring or summer, when turnout tends to be lower. Read Article

Colorado fights Trump administration bid to help imprisoned loyalist Tina Peters | Colleen Slevin/Associated Press

Colorado officials say President Donald Trump’s administration appears to be wielding its “political power” to give unprecedented help to a former county election clerk who was convicted of allowing Trump supporters to access election equipment after his 2020 defeat. The U.S. Justice Department is trying to insert itself into the case of former election clerk Tina Peters, who wants to be released from prison while she appeals her conviction. A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in federal court in Denver. It’s one of the latest Trump administration moves to reward allies who violated the law on the president’s behalf. Peters’ case is among those the government has said it is reviewing for “abuses of the criminal justice process.” Read Article

Colorado lawmakers back new election process for appointed legislators | Seth Klamann/The Denver Post

Colorado lawmakers on Monday backed a pair of bills to reform the much-maligned process that helped seat nearly a quarter of the legislature, while rejecting a competing proposal that would’ve required changing the state constitution. The two favored bills, which cleared an initial House committee, are essentially a package aimed at changing the vacancy-filling process: House Bill 1315 would allow lawmakers appointed via a vacancy committee to serve no more than a full session in the Capitol before standing for an election, while House Bill 1319 would enact similar election parameters for vacancy-appointed commissioners in large counties. Both bills are bipartisan, and they passed the House’s State, Civic, Military and Veteran Affairs Committee in succession. The often-criticized vacancy committee process is used when an elected official leaves office early. That official’s party then convenes a committee of party officials and volunteers to elect a new representative. Read Article

Colorado calls DOJ interest in Tina Peters’ case a ‘grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law’ | Bente Birkeland/Colorado Public Radio

Colorado is asking a federal judge in Denver to reject the U.S. Justice Department’s statement of interest in the case of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters. In its filing, the state writes that the DOJ intervention has no legitimate basis and is a “grotesque attempt to weaponize the rule of law.” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser submitted the filing Tuesday in response to the DOJ’s statement of interest. “The United States cites not a single fact to support its baseless allegations that there are any reasonable concerns about Ms. Peters’ prosecution or sentence, or that the prosecution was politically motivated,” writes Weiser. Read Article