Amid mounting pressure from President Trump, Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters on Friday.
Peters is the former elections administrator of Mesa County, Colorado who went rogue and was convicted for breaching her office’s own voting equipment in her quest to find non-existent evidence of election fraud in the 2020 election.
Back in 2021, Peters, who has become a close ally of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, granted an unauthorized individual access to the county’s voting equipment as a way to somehow prove that President Donald Trump won the 2020 election. The data from this breach was later leaked online.
Peters, who was convicted of several felonies, has been serving a nine-year prison sentence for her 2020 election-related crimes. Peters will now be eligible for parole on June 1 of this year.
“She committed a crime. It did not interfere with any election, did not have to do with ballot counting, but it was illegal access to the computer room,” Polis said in an interview with Colorado Public Radio on Friday. “She thought she was trying to back up the software before it was updated. She did it illegally. There’s no question about it. And she deserves to go to prison. And I think this is a more appropriate, even harsh, frankly, sentence for that crime.”
For months now, Polis has hinted that he was considering commuting Peters’ sentence, prompting his fellow Democrats to urge him not to. Polis has also routinely described Peters’ sentence as “harsh.”
“We always look at people’s sentences and when you have people that are elderly, and we’re looking at this across a number of people — people that are in their 70s and 80s in our system — how much of a threat to society are they? And we balance that in a way that makes sure that they can spend their last few years at home,” he told CPR News.
Trump pardoned Peters last year after Polis refused to transfer Peters to federal authorities. Because Peters was convicted on state charges, Trump’s pardon did not release her from her prison sentence.
Trump has also threatened to withhold federal funding from Colorado if Peters’ sentence was not commuted, and has cut funding for disaster relief and clean water, per reporting from CBS.
The Trump administration has also gone after the consortium responsible for the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in part as a way to get back at Colorado for not freeing Peters. This month the consortium filed a lawsuit against the administration alleging that it was being targeted because of Peters’ prison sentence.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has similarly slashed millions of dollars for transportation funding in Colorado.
Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubenstein, a Republican who prosecuted Peters, previously said that modifying Peters’ prison sentence would be a “gross injustice.”
The current Mesa County clerk and recorder Bobbie Gross, in an earlier interview with TPM, explained that the county is still reeling from Peters’ crimes and warned that early release from her sentence would only reignite the county’s election conspiracy environment.
“If she is released, I believe that it could spark some discontent in the nation, not just Mesa County, but Colorado and other places,” she said.
In a statement on Friday, Colorado House and Senate Democratic leadership strongly opposed Polis’ decision.
“We strongly oppose Governor Polis’ decision to preempt the courts and commute the sentence of a still-unremorseful Tina Peters. Tina Peters sought to overturn the election results and committed a serious crime,” the statement said. “Her actions threatened our elections, and commuting her sentence sends exactly the wrong message at a time when the Trump Administration is threatening vote-by-mail and working to undermine our democracy.”
