Colorado’s governor aligned with a state appeals court in acknowledging that the former Mesa County clerk was punished for both her far-out theories about the 2020 election and her unlawful actions.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, is taking heat for granting clemency to Tina Peters, the former Mesa County clerk and a figure in conspiracy circles who was sentenced to nearly nine years for compromising election security in a bid to prove that voting machines favored Joe Biden in 2020. Yet amid the sharp backlash and questions about timing, Polis’s stated reasons for approving Peters’ early release remain persuasive.
On Friday, Polis reduced Peters’ sentence to four years and four and a half months, announcing that she would be released on June 1 to complete the remainder of the term on parole. Trump, who had repeatedly urged Peters’ release and had even offered a pardon that would not apply to state offenses, welcomed the decision as expected.
As expected, Trump’s critics reacted with fury. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, warned that the commutation would “validate and embolden the election denial movement and leave a dark, dangerous imprint on American democracy for years to come.” Matt Crane, a former Republican election official who now leads the Colorado Clerks Association, said members were “furious, disgusted, and deeply disappointed” by the governor’s “shameful” move, arguing it “supports the attack on the legitimacy of American elections.”
These responses, however, do not grapple with Polis’s stated rationale for commuting Peters’ sentence. In his May 15 clemency letter, Polis cited two principal concerns about her punishment. First, he argued that nine years of confinement is “an extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first-time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.” Second, Polis agreed with a state appeals court that the sentence was partly grounded in Peters’ beliefs rather than her illegal acts, thereby infringing her First Amendment rights.
The central episode in Peters’ case involved unauthorized access to voting machines, which she facilitated by misidentifying Gerald Wood, a local IT consultant, as a county employee, and permitting Conan Hayes, another promoter of the “stolen election” claim, to pose as Wood. Using Wood’s counterfeit employee badge, Hayes copied voting-machine software during the county’s annual update in May 2021. Peters disabled security cameras during the operation but used her own cellphone to document the process. The scheme came to light after staff at the Colorado secretary of state’s office learned that still images from the video, including one showing the county’s passwords, had been posted online.
In 2024, a state jury found Peters guilty on seven counts of felonies and misdemeanors: three counts of attempting to influence a public servant by deceit and one count each of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, and failure to comply with the secretary of state’s requirements. District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced her to six months in the Mesa County jail for the misdemeanors and eight years and three months in prison for the felonies.
“Your lies are well documented, and these convictions are serious,” Barrett observed when delivering the sentence. “At bottom, this case was about your corrupt conduct,” he added, noting that “you abused your position.”
Barrett also faulted Peters for a lack of remorse. “I’m convinced you would do it all over again if you could,” he stated. “You’re as defiant as a defendant as this court has ever seen.”
Here Barrett began to drift into considerations that a state appeals court would later deem legally irrelevant and constitutionally questionable. “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,” he said, alluding to her ongoing promotion of the false claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. “This is what makes Ms. Peters such a danger to our community. It’s the position she held that has provided her the pulpit from which she can preach these lies, the undermining of our democratic process, the undermining of the belief and confidence in our election systems.”
Barrett added that “the damage that is caused and continues to be caused is just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis.” He argued that it is especially damaging when those words come from someone who wields influence. Peters had made “every effort to undermine the integrity of our elections and [the] public’s trust in our institutions,” Barrett said. “You’ve done it from that lectern the voting public provided you with. Everything you’ve done has been done to retain control, influence. The damage is immeasurable. And every time it gets refuted, every time it’s shown to be false, just another tale is weaved.”
Last month, the Colorado Court of Appeals noted that those remarks suggested Peters’ constitutionally protected advocacy played a role in her sentence. “It is well settled that the First Amendment generally prohibits punishing someone for their protected speech,” Judge Ted C. Tow wrote in an opinion joined by the panel’s other members. “Here, the trial court’s comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing. Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud. Indeed, under these circumstances, just as her purported beliefs underlying her motive for her actions were not relevant to her defense, the trial court should not have considered those beliefs relevant when imposing sentence.”
Although “some of the trial court’s considerations were tied to proper sentencing considerations,” Tow wrote, “it is apparent that the court imposed the lengthy sentence it did because Peters continued to espouse the views that led her to commit these crimes. The tenor of the court’s comments makes clear that it felt the sentence length was necessary, at least in part, to prevent her from continuing to espouse views the court deemed ‘damaging.'”
Barrett “failed to acknowledge that Peters is no longer the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder,” Tow noted. “She is no longer in a position to engage in the conduct that led to her conviction. So it cannot be said that the lengthy prison sentence was for specific deterrence. To the contrary, the sentence punished Peters for her persistence in espousing her beliefs regarding the integrity of the 2020 election.”
The appeals court concluded that Barrett “obviously erred by imposing sentence at least partially based on Peters’s protected speech.” It therefore remanded the case for resentencing.
Polis circumvented that step by commuting Peters’ sentence. With his intervention, Peters, now 70, will spend less than two years behind bars. Under the original punishment, she would have become eligible for parole after serving roughly four years in prison.
“The crimes you were convicted of are very serious,” Polis wrote to Peters, “and you deserve to spend time in prison for these offenses.” But he added that “your application demonstrates taking responsibility for your crimes, and a commitment to follow the law going forward.” He argued that Peters’ expression of remorse, combined with the appearance that she had been punished for her opinions as well as her actions, justified the commutation.
“I made mistakes, and for those I am sorry,” Peters posted in a Friday afternoon X message. “Five years ago I misled the Secretary of State when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward I will make sure that my actions always follow the law, and I will avoid the mistakes of the past.”
Polis stressed that he had not granted Peters a pardon. “She committed a crime,” he told The New York Times. “She deserves to be a convicted felon.” But he added that “she was given an unusually harsh sentence.” Although her beliefs about the 2020 election are “dangerously wrong,” he said, they should not have intensified her punishment.
The political backdrop to Polis’s decision nevertheless invites questions about his motives. Even as Trump pressed Polis to pardon Peters, the Times notes, his administration was punishing Colorado with “a series of funding cuts and other actions,” including “killing a water pipeline for rural ranchers, moving the U.S. Space Command headquarters from Colorado Springs to Alabama and dismantling a leading federal climate center in Boulder.” Although none of those actions was explicitly tied to the Peters case, the governor’s critics accuse him of yielding to Trump’s pressure.
Polis, for his part, insists that the hope of appeasing the president played no role in his decision. He notes that Trump sought a pardon for Peters, which Polis refused to grant, and that the administration was unhappy with Colorado for other reasons, such as its liberal mail-in voting policy. “There was no immediate indication” that Trump would reward the commutation by easing Colorado’s penalties, the Times notes. “That’s not something I ever considered,” Polis told the paper.
Whether or not one buys that explanation, opponents of clemency for Peters tend to sidestep the central question of whether a nine-year term was appropriate for her crimes. “The harm caused by Tina Peters has spread far beyond Mesa County,” Griswold wrote in a January 13 letter to Polis. “Her actions have been repeatedly used to spread conspiracy theories, amplify falsehoods, and fuel dangerous election lies. This, in turn, has increased threats to election officials and election infrastructure across our state. Releasing Tina Peters via pardon or commutation would validate her actions and embolden election denialism in Colorado and across the country.”
As with Barrett, Griswold suggested Peters should be punished not only for abusing her office and betraying public trust but also for “spreading conspiracy theories,” “amplifying falsehoods,” “fueling dangerous election lies,” and “emboldening election denialism.” Yet the Colorado Court of Appeals acknowledged that those aspects of Peters’ conduct, while corrupting, are not a legitimate basis for punishment in a society that respects free speech.
