Tina Peters and QAnon Support Belief Election Stolen

Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters speaks during
Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium,” Aug. 2021
Screenshot of livestream

Tina Peters, the Republican Mesa County Clerk, says the Colorado election was stolen due to voting machines not counting the votes correctly. She made the claim publicly at a cyber symposium sponsored by My Pillow founder, Mike Lindell. Allegedly, she allowed a QAnon advocate access to the security information used to run elections data. She’s been removed from control over the election and is being investigated by the FBI and local county prosecutor.

Tripp Baltz of Bloomberg just published an article on how the Arizona faux “audit” is now spreading nationally. Along with Mesa County’s Tina Peters, he cites Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

I told him if it can happen in Colorado by a rogue election official, it can happen anywhere.

It’s “not surprising these audits are spreading,” said Floyd Ciruli of the Denver polling and consulting firm Ciruli & Associates. “There are national forces that are encouraging this. Colorado is considered to be a model of efficiency and convenience. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere.”

Mesa County was won by Donald Trump by 28 points while he lost the state by 14. He knew he was doomed and did not campaign in Colorado. Conservative Republican congressperson and strong Trump supporter, Lauren Boebert, also won the county by 28 percent while winning her district by 6 points. Republicans were greatly assisted by the Mesa County Republican voters, but Trump was beyond help and Boebert was probably elected by the Mesa County result. There is no evidence for Peters’ claims of an undercount or switch vote. Nor is there any basis in her statements that Republicans were harmed.

As I stated in the article, the state’s mail-back voting system is considered a national model. It was approved by voters in 2012 and was the model many states looked at during the pandemic election last year. More than 3.2 million voted by mail in the November election – a record turnout.

In a Crossley Center for Public Opinion Research poll conducted during the 2020 November election, 82 percent of Coloradans were supportive of the mail-back system with 57 percent “strongly approve” and only 8 percent “strongly disapprove.”

As the Denver Post editorialized, the good news is that Peters “won’t be overseeing the next election,” but as Tripp Baltz pointed out, the bad news is that the conspiracy theory has spread to a host of others states besides Arizona.