Tina Marie Peters (born September 11, 1955) is an American politician who served as County Clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, from 2019 to 2023. In 2021, she was temporarily suspended by the Colorado Secretary of State, and was convicted of criminal charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election of Joe Biden as U.S. President. In August 2024, she was convicted in Colorado state court on seven charges—four of which were felonies—relating to unauthorized access to election machines. She was subsequently sentenced to nine years of incarceration. On December 11, 2025, President Donald Trump claimed to have pardoned Peters, though that had no effect on her state convictions. Following Trump's threats to withhold federal funding from Colorado, on May 15, 2026, Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted Peters' sentence. She was released on parole on June 1, 2026.
Education and career Peters holds a degree in holistic nutrition from the non-accredited correspondence school Clayton College of Natural Health. She sold alternative medical products in association with a multi-level marketing company named Nikken. Peters also helped manage her former husband's construction company.
Peters, a member of the Republican Party, was elected county clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, in 2018, her first elected office. She had campaigned on a platform calling for improved service from the Clerk and Recorder's motor vehicle offices.
In February 2020, employees in Peters' office discovered an unemptied ballot box in a parking lot in front of the Mesa County election headquarters in Grand Junction, containing 574 ballots cast in the November 2019 election. The ballots had remained there, uncounted, for months, which Peters attributed to "human error". Given the margin of victory in Mesa County elections, this late finding did not change the outcome of any race. This incident and other issues led to a voter recall attempt for Peters from April to August 2020. The recall effort failed by approximately 1,200 signatures to reach the 12,129 required for the question to appear on the ballot in the November 3, 2020, general election.
On November 8, 2021, the Colorado Secretary of State filed a lawsuit against Peters over her fundraising efforts and failure to report contributions and expenses for nearly three years.
On January 13, 2022, Peters formally filed as a candidate for reelection as Mesa County Clerk and Recorder. On February 14, 2022, she dropped her candidacy to run in the Republican primary election for Colorado Secretary of State, which concluded on June 28, 2022. She came in second out of three candidates, and stated that she did not accept the result, suggesting election fraud. News coverage described her as one of several election deniers running for positions of management or influence over future elections. In late July 2022, Peters paid the $256,000 required for the state to conduct a manual recount of votes cast in the primary election. The recount barely changed the totals, with Peters gaining 13 votes, and still having a vote share of 29 percent.
On October 4, 2023, the Colorado Office of Administrative Courts fined Peters $15,400 for violating the Fair Campaign Practice Act by failing to register as a candidate, and failing to file accurate campaign donation and expenditure reports while running for reelection for Mesa County Clerk and Recorder. Though she formally filed on January 13, 2022, the violations occurred between September 2021 and February 2022, before she dropped out of that race on February 14.
Computer breach: 2020 United States presidential election After elections, Mesa County uses a risk-limiting audit procedure to ensure that the results on paper ballots match the results reported by tabulation machines. The audit process involves a bipartisan group of staff and volunteers to randomly select a number of paper ballots and manually check those results against the results issued by a tabulation machine. On November 19, 2020, Peters signed off on the results of the risk-limiting audit for Mesa County, stating there were no issues or discrepancies with the results of the 2020 election in the county.
Despite signing documents that agreed there were no discrepancies in the election results for the county, Peters met with individuals who promoted the false claim that the 2020 election was illegitimate. In the months following the 2020 election, she allowed an unauthorized person to access the Mesa County's Dominion electronic voting machines and to copy the hard drives of those machines.
In 2024, Peters was convicted in Colorado's 21st judicial district on felony charges relating to this unauthorized access and was sentenced to nine years in prison. She was also ordered to pay thousands of dollars in fines. She was immediately taken into custody.
Granting unauthorized access to voting machines In May 2021, Peters ordered surveillance cameras monitoring the voting machines in the clerk's office turned off, and that they would be reactivated in advance of the next election in August 2021, according to an email sent by Mesa County Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley and later cited in evidence by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Peters later stated that no law or election rule required security cameras that monitor election equipment to operate continuously; at minimum, they must be on 60 days before an election and 30 days afterward. Mesa County Commissioner Janet Rowland stated that Peters had not turned off the cameras after any of the eight previous elections that Peters had overseen since 2018.
In the days following her order to turn off the surveillance cameras, Peters allowed Conan Hayes, co-founder of the clothing company RVCA and proponent of QAnon conspiracy theories, to access the room where Mesa County's electronic voting machines were stored and to copy sensitive information from those machines. Days later, Peters allowed Hayes to be present for a software update to the voting machines and to record video of the update taking place. Peters' chief aide, former deputy clerk Belinda Knisley, described Hayes as a "mystery man", and said that Peters told her she brought him in to access files from the voting machines because Peters "was afraid the Colorado Secretary of State's office was going to remove them".
During the time Hayes was present, he used a staff access badge for Gerald Wood, and according to Griswold, Peters misled her staff by saying "Wood" was an employee and had been background-checked. Phone records confirmed that Hayes had traveled to the area during the time of the software update. His hotel room was paid for by Sherronna Bishop, then-campaign manager for Boebert. Peters later said that she, Bishop, Hayes, and United States Representative Lauren Boebert had dinner together on May 24.
Publication of stolen voting machine data In August 2021, Ron Watkins, conspiracy theorist and site administrator of the imageboard website 8kun, published computer files associated with the Mesa County election system, including "forensic images of Mesa County's voting machines along with video of [a software] update and partially blurred passwords" on a Telegram channel. The Gateway Pundit also published passwords, video, and data associated with the Mesa County election system.
Dominion, the company that made Mesa County's voting machines, identified the leaked passwords as belonging to the machines in Mesa County. The company alerted the state, and Griswold ordered an inspection of the county's voting equipment the following day and prohibited anyone from touching the equipment without her written permission. The order stated: "The posted images depict the BIOS passwords specific to the individual hardware stations of Mesa County's voting system. These passwords can only be used physically at a voting system at the Mesa County Clerk's Office." Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein assigned an investigator to look into the security breach. On August 10, Colorado Department of State staff accessed the county election equipment and some records at the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder's office. They found security vulnerabilities in the servers and boot settings. Peters described the search as a "raid" and, saying that her chief deputy had not been allowed to be present, said: "I don't know what they did, but I can tell you I don't trust them."
A day after state officials investigated the voting machines in Mesa County, Peters attended a 2020 election conspiracy conference held by Mike Lindell, CEO of MyPillow and conspiracy theorist. During the conference, Ron Watkins presented via livestream the computer files associated with the Mesa County election system he had shared on Telegram previously. He claimed "the files were from hard drives taken 'without authorization' from Peters' office", which he said his lawyer instructed him to disclose.
At the conference, Peters denied the files had come from her office, and if they had, questioned if the leak of data was a problem. She claimed:If those passwords were compromised, why can't they just change them? How many of you have had to change your email password before? Is that a big deal? You just change it. We're not in the middle of an election right now... It's not like some secret people came and did something nefarious.
Decertification of compromised voting machines On August 12, 2021, Griswold issued Election Order 2021-02 (EO-02), which announced the decertification of the county's voting equipment, which would have to be replaced before the November election unless Mesa County chose to conduct a hand count of ballots. Additionally, Griswold announced that Peters could no longer oversee the 2021 election.
On August 17, 2021, the FBI investigated the alleged Mesa County election equipment breach alongside the Colorado Department of State's and County Treasurer's offices. Peters was not present when officials went to meet her and inspect the equipment. Griswold issued a third Election Order, 2021-03 (EO-03), stating that Peters was in hiding and not complying, and as such, Mesa County Treasurer and former Clerk and Recorder Sheila Reiner was permitted to take control of the Mesa County elections as Election Supervisor. Griswold appointed her Republican predecessor, former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams, as the Designated Election Official. The U.S. Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) looked into the alleged breach and determined that the incident did not risk the integrity of elections in either the state or the country, according to the secretary of state's office. On August 19, 2021, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell told Vice News in an interview that Peters was "holed up" in a safe house provided by him for her protection. A member of Lindell's own security team leaked the location, so she was moved to another unknown location. On August 21, 2021, a support rally was held for Peters in Mesa County; her supporters claimed there had been a security breach.
On August 24, 2021, the all-Republican Mesa County Board of County Commissioners voted unanimously to replace 41 compromised pieces of election equipment with new equipment also from Dominion Voting Systems. Thirty-four county residents spoke to the commission before the vote, all opposing the Dominion contract. The commissioners extended the service agreement for eight years (to 2029) and purchased a "Dominion Ballot Audit Review" for $3,300 per election, for a total cost of $825,281. The agreement with Dominion included a promise that the company would not file a civil lawsuit against the county over defamatory remarks allegedly made by Peters.
Removal from overseeing 2021 election