By admin Earlier this year, Tina Peters was languishing in a Colorado women’s prison, eating processed food, and complaining of declining health—including a persistent cough, digestive issues, and bumps on her skin. But by the end of June, the woman who was convicted on charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020 strolled into the White House, sporting a tailored pinstripe suit and red lipstick, her hair cut in a sharp bob. She feasted on a fried-chicken-and-noodle dish with President Trump in his private dining room and posed for photos in the Oval Office. She told the president about her ordeal and “what prison does to a person,” and they both bemoaned the state of the nation’s voting systems. “He was kind. He listened,” Peters told me in an email.
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Peters, once a martyr to the MAGA cause, is now a free woman, feted by the stolen-election movement. The former clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after prosecutors said she deceived colleagues to grant an unauthorized person access to voting equipment. After returning to office, Trump, aided by his White House counsel and Justice Department, spearheaded a campaign to “Free Tina Peters” as MAGA commentators and her attorneys relentlessly used the power of their keyboards to demand her release. But because Peters was convicted of state charges, the only person with the power to get her out was Colorado Governor Jared Polis. The Democrat bowed to extraordinary pressure in May and granted Peters clemency despite pleas from prosecutors, his clemency board, and election officials that her punishment was just.
Peters was released on June 1 after serving about 20 months of her sentence. Her freedom came as Trump ordered the nation’s intelligence community to find proof of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election—only for it to again come up empty. That hasn’t stopped Peters, who wants the government to go even further in its efforts to find fraud she alleges exists from 2020 and overhaul rules and systems over the next three months to prevent malfeasance in November’s midterm elections.
She walked out of prison repeating many of the unsubstantiated claims that helped land her behind bars. She immediately hit the MAGA circuit, appearing on podcasts and livestreams from locations that look straight out of Architectural Digest. She has crusaded against the machinery used to conduct American elections, insisting that votes have been flipped and that foreign adversaries could exploit future contests. She rails against prison conditions and calls for one of her critics—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat—to be locked up. Her comeback tour has taken her around the country, including, on June 30, to the White House’s Presidential Walk of Fame, where a photo showed her glancing adoringly at Trump’s portrait while holding what appeared to be a Birkin bag. During the visit she and Trump talked about “election integrity,” Peters told me, including “why people need a process they can verify—paper, open counts, accountability.”
Peters has said in nearly all of these media appearances that the actions that landed her in prison were an attempt to expose irregularities in her county’s voting equipment. She insists that her incarceration was “retribution” for showing that votes could be flipped—though there is no evidence of that claim. Ahead of the midterms she is imploring Trump to declare a national emergency on elections as a way to try to assert federal control over contests that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. “We don’t have to prove anymore that these machines are cheating, that the ballots are being harvested,” Peters told War Room, a show hosted by the Trump ally Steve Bannon. The chyron identified her as a Former Political Prisoner.
No longer subjected to rigid routines, head counts, or fixed mealtimes, Peters has enjoyed choosing her own food again, including steak, salads, and juicy tomatoes (“things that taste like they came from a kitchen instead of a tray.”) “Right now I’m trying to get healthy,” Peters told me. “See the people I love, and keep doing lawful work. I’m not interested in living bitter.” Her faith helped her endure especially tough moments. “I’m grateful to God,” she wrote. “Some days feel normal. Some don’t.” Peters must get permission from a parole officer before traveling out of state.
Election denial has become her full-time job. She directs supporters to her recently revamped website, where she asks that they contribute to her cause (a red “Donate” button hovers in the top-right corner). At a “Fraud Fighter Summit” off the Las Vegas Strip in June, Peters took the stage, clutching a bouquet of flowers, to the delight of the crowd, and a moderator gushed about how “wonderful” she looked. Peters talked on speakerphone with Roseanne Barr, who had planned to attend the conference but had to scrap her trip. “Congratulations for being released from detainment in a communist country, Tina,” the sitcom star said. “You are our hero.” They pledged to take a girls’ trip at some point soon. Hawaii, Peters said, sounded like a good destination, adding: “I can still travel.”
Peters has a history of finding herself embroiled in election disputes. She was elected Mesa County clerk and recorder in 2018 after campaigning on a promise to reopen a closed DMV office. Fruita, Colorado, got its motor-vehicles branch back, but Peters soon found herself in the middle of her first voting-related controversy. Nearly 600 ballots cast in a November 2019 election were found in a drop box outside the clerk’s office months later; an effort to recall Peters over the discovery failed to collect enough signatures. In November 2020 Trump won Mesa County, amassing nearly two-thirds of votes cast.
But that election, Peters claimed in 2021, was tainted. Prosecutors said that Peters ordered video cameras to be turned off and deceived colleagues to obtain credentials that allowed an election-denial activist to access election equipment. Peters ran for Colorado secretary of state, despite being charged with numerous felonies, on a platform that included the claim that election equipment posed a threat to democracy. She lost in the primary. In 2024, a jury found her guilty of seven charges, including four felonies. The judge presiding over the case called Peters a “charlatan” and said that Peters, not faulty equipment, posed a threat to the electoral process.
Trump returned to the Oval Office a few months after her conviction and quickly started a campaign to spring her from prison through pressure and threats of retaliation. He warned that “harsh measures” would ensue if she remained incarcerated and directed his Justice Department “to take all necessary action to help secure the release of this ‘hostage.’” Peters was convicted on state charges beyond Trump’s pardon power, but in December he issued one anyway. Senior U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson, in a preliminary order blocking the administration’s threat to cut Colorado’s SNAP benefits, that Trump called Polis “weak and pathetic” for keeping Peters confined, and that the administration had launched “a barrage of threats and actions designed, by all appearances, to punish Colorado.” They included terminating millions of Department of Transportation funds, threatening cancellation of energy funds, announcing a plan to dismantle the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, and denying federal disaster-relief assistance.
An appeals court upheld Peters’s conviction a few weeks later, but found that the judge who presided over her case may have improperly considered her public comments—violating her First Amendment rights—and ordered that she be resentenced. Instead, Polis decided to commute her sentence. He wrote that hers was an “extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.” An addendum to her clemency application that I obtained shows she acknowledges having “made mistakes,” that she pledged to obey the law if released, and that she noted that she wouldn’t have the ability to commit similar crimes since she is no longer a county clerk. “My work to ensure honest elections,” she wrote, “will continue.”
When Peters was freed, on June 1, Francis McClelland was ready to greet her. Carrying a handmade sign reading Tina Peters Mahalo for Your Sacrifice Fight Fight Fight, the 69-year-old stood outside of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo with a handful of other supporters. McClelland had never understood why Peters would be imprisoned for trying to help prove that elections are rigged, and so he rented a car in Philadelphia and drove out to Colorado hoping to see her. But he made the trip in vain. Neither state-prison officials nor those close to her would say where she was, citing security concerns. “I just wanted to be in the area and if she saw the sign, just to know that, ‘Hey, man, you made a sacrifice,’” McClelland, an independent Trump supporter from Hawaii, told me. “You shouldn’t back down when you’re right,” he said. “I do believe she’s right.”
Peters told me her early days outside of prison were mostly quiet, and devoted to the simple pleasures of her new freedom. She slept, and ate avocados. She went outside without asking permission. “I called people,” she told me. “I hugged people. I did boring grown-up stuff you can’t do inside. It wasn’t a parade. It was me trying to feel like a person.”
In her first media appearance after her release, on War Room, Peters appeared alongside a friend and looked tired. “I feel like I’ve aged about 10 years,” she said. She called her release a “miracle” and thanked Trump, her attorneys, and the supporters who sent money through her website. She said she had a long road to clear her name and then went right back to the themes that had landed her in trouble, saying that Democrats “are going to cheat” in elections. “No one’s really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for,” she said. “And that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped. As we’re coming up to our 250-year anniversary, I’m joyful that we still have our liberty but, at the same time, I’m very concerned and burdened with why no one is talking about this.”
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The Tina Peters tour hasn’t stopped since. She joins the MAGA-sphere from a constantly changing rotation of tastefully decorated settings, including a room with small duck figurines in the background and another with furniture upholstered in black-and-white chevron. She was spotted at a gathering with Arizona’s Kari Lake, another prominent voice in the election-skeptic movement. And wherever she appears, she always implores viewers to hit that red “Donate” button on her site.
In June, a 12-hour online “Lift Tina Telethon” featured a roster of MAGA personalities applauding her sacrifice. She was likened to Joan of Arc and Nelson Mandela, and someone suggested that her face should be carved into Mount Rushmore. A banner crawling across the bottom of the screen asked viewers to Please DONATE NOW to reach a fundraising goal that one speaker set from $1 million to $2 million. Peters made her appearance midway through, and choked up almost immediately. She spoke of her time in prison, during which she wrote letters to Trump, and of a call she had with the president after her release. “I told him, ‘I only wrote two people while I was in prison,’” she said. “I got thousands and thousands of letters. I’m just so humbled and grateful because you guys were, and still are, the wind beneath my wings.” Peters said she told Trump she was discouraged that little progress had been made to secure election equipment. She hoped to talk more about it with him soon. She was staring down other problems, the kind that viewer donations might fix: Her air-conditioning had gone out, and so had the brakes on her truck. “It’s real difficult for me to ask for myself,” she said.
The tour’s biggest stop, the White House, came at Trump’s request, according to Peters’s attorney Peter Ticktin. “He really admires her because she’s an American hero—and he referred to her as such,” Ticktin, a longtime friend of the president’s, told me. “She’s the one he wanted to meet.” Ticktin declined to say what was discussed. Peters said she felt valued during that visit. She spoke with the president about what she saw as a county clerk, how prison affects people, and of the need for “paper, open counts, accountability” in elections. “He talked like he actually cares what happens to regular people,” she wrote to me, “which is not how a lot of papers write him up.” At one point during the visit, she clutched a red AMERICA IS BACK! hat. She also met with Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney, and was presented with a gold eagle brooch representing the Eagle Forum, the conservative advocacy group founded by Phyllis Schlafly.
The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not answer questions about the meeting with Peters, but said in a statement that “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” Trump wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and voter ID to vote, as well as “other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting,” Jackson wrote.
Two weeks after Peters visited the White House, Trump delivered a primetime address on election security, but again failed to provide clear evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Many, including Peters, had hoped for more. On X, she called on Trump to “declare a National emergency” surrounding elections “to protect our country.” She later joined a handful of other election activists calling on federal officials to enforce a “Risk Mitigation Election Plan” before November that would, among other things, require hand-counting each ballot for federal contests before votes are certified, and compare them with counts tallied by electronic tabulators. “The objective is clear: reduce the opportunity for cheating,” read a July 24 letter from the activists to the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA did not answer my questions about the activists’ proposed plan or a meeting the activists said they had with the agency.
Many of the people who administer America’s elections are dismayed by Peters’s post-prison celebrity. Her efforts to convince people that their elections can’t be trusted make the job of administrators more difficult and dangerous, they told me. “She didn’t learn a thing,” Carly Koppes, the Weld County, Colorado, clerk and recorder, said. “Her stance on ‘remorse’ is despicable, and she’s doing exactly what we told the governor she was going to do.” Tiffany Lee, the clerk and recorder from La Plata County, told me she and her staff cried with relief when Peters was sentenced. Now she is angry about what she termed Peters’s “sabotage” road show. “I knew for a fact that she would go right back to getting the attention,” Lee said.
When I asked Peters what she would say to people who allege that her claims are false, she deflected. “I didn’t create the mistrust,” she wrote in the email. “For years the public got told everything was the most secure ever, and basic questions got treated like a threat. Now a lot of Americans say they don’t trust the process.”
Peters has her own ideas for making elections more secure. “Yelling at citizens won’t fix it. Proof will. Hand-marked paper. Paper poll books. Chain of custody. Counts people can watch, especially in federal races. That’s clearer than black-box machines and electronic poll books,” she wrote. “Making an election observable isn’t an attack on the country. It’s how you earn confidence back.” Election experts mostly dismiss these proposals as impractical, or warn they could produce large-scale errors.
Peters’s podcaster pals, attorneys, and online supporters told me they see her as a symbol of a broader resistance against forces of evil who are attempting to overtake America. “She’s very brave,” Steve Stern, a Republican activist in Broward County, Florida who hosts The Stern American Show on Rumble, told me. (Peters has treated his audience to interviews at least twice since her release.) “She’s trying to do something to help the country.”
Ticktin and another of her attorneys, John Case, told me they have earned no money from representing Peters. “Hopefully someday I’ll get fully compensated,” Case said, laughing. “But it’s doubtful. I’m not doing it for money—I’ll put it that way.” (At one point in his career, he charged $350 an hour.) Ticktin told me the work he’s doing at his own expense to help Peters is bigger than her: It’s about exposing “the biggest crime in the history of the United States—to steal our country.” Peters told me that some of her supporters were misled by fundraising pages that had nothing to do with her. Donations made on her website, she said, help pay for “legitimate costs: legal bills, security when needed,” and travel expenses for her advocacy work.
Her saga damaged some of her relationships with family members, she said. “That still stings,” she wrote. “I’m very grateful for my mom, for the family who stayed, and for the friends and supporters who didn’t throw me away.” She said she is doing ordinary things with family members and catching up on the past two years. When I talked briefly on the phone with her last month, she said she was traveling. “I’ll be in Texas tomorrow; I’ll be in different places the next few days,” she told me, her voice carrying a hint of a southern drawl. She later stressed that she’s traveling for work, not play.
When Peters first hit the election-activist circuit, the movement was dismissed by many elected officials and experts as “fringe.” Six years later, with Trump back in office and election deniers winning races up and down the ballot nationwide, the movement has been mainstreamed within the GOP even as the public’s trust in elections has declined. Their attempts to one day prove that 2020 was stolen may never bear fruit. But activists are already gearing up to uncover the fraud they believe might help Democrats win back Congress in 2026.
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