Jurors deliberating in case of Colorado clerk Tina Peters in election computer system breach

By  COLLEEN SLEVIN

DENVER (AP) — Prosecutors urged jurors Monday to convict a former Colorado clerk in a security breach of her county’s election computers, saying she sought fame by duping her employees into working with outsiders affiliated with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the nation’s foremost election conspiracy theorists.

In closing arguments at Tina Peters’ trial, prosecutor Janet Drake argued that the former clerk allowed a man posing as a county employee to take images of the election system’s hard drive before and after a software upgrade in May 2021.

Drake said Peters observed the update so she could become the “hero” and appear at Lindell’s symposium on the 2020 presidential election a few months later. Lindell is a prominent promoter of false claims that voting machines were manipulated to steal the election from Donald Trump.

“The defendant was a fox guarding the henhouse. It was her job to protect the election equipment, and she turned on it and used her power for her own advantage,” said Drake, a lawyer from the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.

Drake has been working for the district attorney in Mesa County, a largely Republican county near the Utah border, to prosecute the case.

Before jurors began deliberations, the defense told them that Peters had not committed any crimes and only wanted to preserve election records after the county would not allow it to have one of its technology experts present at the software update.

Defense lawyer John Case said Peters had to preserve records to access the voting system to find out things like whether anyone from “China or Canada” had accessed the machine while ballots were being counted.

“And thank God she did. Otherwise we really wouldn’t know what happened,” he said.

Peters allowed a former surfer affiliated with Lindell, Conan Hayes, to observe the software update and make copies of the hard drive using the security badge of a local man, Gerald Wood, who Peters said worked for her. But while prosecutors say Peters committed identity theft by taking Wood’s security badge and giving it to Hayes to conceal his identity, the defense says Wood was in on the scheme so Peters did not commit a crime by doing that.

Wood denied that when he testified during the trial.

Political activist Sherronna Bishop, who helped introduce Peters to people working with Lindell, testified that Wood knew his identity would be used based on a Signal chat between her, Wood and Peters. No agreement was spelled out in the chat.

The day after the first image of the hard drive was taken, Bishop testified that she posted a voice recording in the chat. The content of that recording was not included in screenshots of the chat introduced by the defense. The person identified as Wood responded to that unknown message by saying “I was glad to help out. I do hope the effort proved fruitful,” according to the screenshots.

Prosecutor Robert Shapiro told jurors that Bishop was not credible.

Peters is charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, one count of identity theft, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state.

Peters’ case was the first instance amid the 2020 conspiracy theories in which a local election official was charged with a suspected security breach of voting systems. It heightened concerns nationally for the potential of insider threats, in which rogue election workers sympathetic to lies about the 2020 election might use their access to election equipment and the knowledge gained through the breaches to launch an attack from within.