Tina Peters is the symptom of a deeper rot
They're chaos agents who want to destroy systems, not improve them.
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Tina Peters is going to the slammer. The former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, is the latest right-wing Trump supporter to suffer criminal consequences for acting on the Big Lie.
“You are no hero,” Colorado Judge Matthew Barrett told her while sentencing her to nine years in prison last Thursday. “You abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using, your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.”
Trump, of course, has faced no consequences and even got the conservatives on the Supreme Court to create a new form of immunity for him. But Tina Peters is more than just a casualty of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. She’s part of a larger trend of right-wingers in government positions who are there not to serve the people, but to destroy the systems and institutions our democracy depends on.
In August, a Colorado jury found Peters guilty of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, failing to comply with the secretary of state, violation of duty, and three counts of attempting to influence a public servant. Those criminal charges stemmed from Peters, who was the official responsible for elections in the county, giving right-wing conspiracy theorists access to the county’s Dominion Voting Systems machines to help prove their baseless claims about machines flipping votes.
Peters falsified employment credentials to let Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer turned self-styled data expert who also illegally accessed voting machines in Georgia, copy the hard drive of a Dominion machine. Eventually, the material Hayes copied, including county passwords and data about Dominion’s software, appeared at an event hosted by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the people most committed to the Big Lie. The data also showed up on right-wing websites, presented as proof that Dominion altered voting results.
Needless to say, this is extremely illegal. It also proved to be extremely expensive, as Mesa County had to pay for a substitute clerk while Peters made the rounds of right-wing events and officials did a hand count in a subsequent election to show it was fair. The state decertified Mesa County’s voting machines after the breach, forcing it to spend nearly $100,000 thus far on getting new machines. The county estimated that Peters’s actions have cost it $1.4 million thus far.
Distressingly, Peters wasn’t the only county elections employee in on the scheme. Her former deputy clerk and a former elections manager both pleaded guilty over their roles and agreed to testify against Peters.
A modern day Kim Davis
Peters’s saga — defiance of the law followed by becoming a right-wing hero followed by legal consequences — is similar to that of Kim Davis.
In 2015, after same-sex marriage became legal in every state, Davis, then the clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky, refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, saying she was acting “under God’s authority.” She defied a federal court order to issue licenses, briefly spending time in jail for contempt. Davis contended that she could not issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple because it “conflicts with God’s definition of marriage,” and having her name on the certificate would violate her conscience.
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Of course, Davis could have obeyed her conscience by letting someone else in the office issue those licenses, or she could have resigned her post, given that she would not perform a core function of the job. Instead, she argued that if the deputy clerk issued licenses to same-sex couples, those licenses were invalid without her signature. She refused to step down from her elected position, even running again in 2018.
Thankfully, she lost. She was eventually ordered to pay $260,104 in fees and expenses to lawyers who represented one of the same-sex couples refused a license, on top of the $100,000 she was ordered to pay the couple. Instead of paying, she filed an appeal with the Sixth Circuit, and in her brief, argued that Obergefell v. Hodges, the case that declared a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, should be overturned.
Davis was never interested in a solution that would accommodate her conscience. Instead, she wanted to stay in her government job and use it to impose her beliefs on everyone else.
It’s not just Peters and Davis. Since the 2020 election, right-wing extremists have burrowed into government positions where they can create chaos, foment distrust, and try to empower reactionaries by any means necessary. In Arizona, Mohave County Supervisor Ron Gould tried to force a rule that ballots would be hand-counted. When the state attorney general explained that there might be criminal consequences for refusing to use voting machines for the count, Gould sued, saying he felt threatened and intimidated.
Hand-counting is a solution in search of a problem
Thanks to their nonsensical fixation about voting machines changing votes to guarantee a Biden win, election deniers have been pushing for hand counts across the country. The problem with this plan, besides that it’s driven by partisan conspiracy theorists, is that hand-counting costs more, takes much longer, and is much less accurate than machine counts.
In Shasta County, California, the county board voted to cancel the contract with Dominion and explore a hand count. For a county of just 111,000 voters, the estimate was that a hand count would cost at least $1.6 million, require an additional 1,200 staff, and take 18 days. Republicans in Gillespie County, Texas, tried a hand count for the March 2024 Republican primary after being urged to do so by Mark Cook, who is literally traveling the country trying to convince counties to use hand counts. The manual count of only around 8,000 ballots resulted in a cavalcade of errors and miscounts in all but one precinct and required the party chair to report results twice after catching a discrepancy in the final tally.
Though the Gillespie County Republicans undertook the hand count because of their belief that it would be more secure and more accurate than a machine count, they were surprisingly blithe about errors. One of the people who had pushed for the hand count — David Treibs, a member of the Fredericksburg Tea Party — went on Mike Lindell’s social media platform to explain that he made errors in the count, but it didn’t matter.
“So there were two ballots, and I just didn't add them up,” Treibs said. “So I would have had to add 450 and two, and it would have been 452 and I didn't. I just forgot to fill it in. So I don't really think that's something that's going to shut down the election and it's like, ‘oh my gosh, he didn't add 450 and two and come up with 452 and now that means the whole election was a failure.’ Well, that's ridiculous.”
The Gillespie County Republicans have refused to allow any audit or recount to confirm the results are accurate.
While the Gillespie County race was a low-stakes primary race, election deniers have taken over the elections board for the entire state of Georgia. They’ve passed a new rule allowing county boards — many of which are now dominated by partisans who believe the 2020 election was stolen — to “investigate” things they think are irregular and refuse to certify vote totals in precincts.
There’s no pretense that this isn’t about forcing a Trump victory. ProPublica reported that the new rule was pushed by Julie Adams, a leader of the Election Integrity Network. The founder of the Election Integrity Network, Cleta Mitchell, was on the 2020 call where Trump demanded that the Georgia secretary of state find him more votes.
None of this is about good governance or fair elections. Instead, these folks have infiltrated government jobs and election oversight positions for two reasons. First, they’re driven by a goal of imposing their views on others, be that by stealing a Trump victory or manipulating a right-wing religious outcome. Next, wreckers like Peters are agents of chaos, making the work of government harder and less efficient.
When that happens, conservatives can say that the government can’t be trusted and isn’t functioning properly, requiring their heavy-handed, brainwormed intervention. These people are only here to break the system and make everything worse for the rest of us.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
I am reading project 2025 in a Democrats Abroad book club group. I have been helped in my understanding of it by Andra Watkins who has an impassioned Substack pointing out the Christian Nationalist agenda. It is clear that the goals of the Heritage Foundation and the MAGA party are to turn the USA into a Christian Nationalist Theocracy, every bit as bad as Iran, in fact worse, because until they implement all they have planned and turned us into a third world country, we will have too much power globally. People must understand that these bit players, who are wreaking such havok are a small fraction of what we will have to deal with if Trump gets elected and either he or JD Vance runs the country.
When I read of how so many individuals (and know some in my circle) seem to have been brainwashed into believing the rhetoric put forth by the MAGA conspiracy groups, I wonder what it will take for them to finally see the truth- or if they will be capable of having their eyes opened to some of the absolute nonsense they have been spoon fed. I have to have hope that they will not win this election, and our country can begin the slow journey back from this division.