Over the last few days, everyone and their Mother Jones has been talking about Tina Peters, the convicted election fraudster, and whether Colorado Governor Jared Polis “did the right thing” in commuting her sentence last week. This debate doesn’t fall along party lines so neatly. The Atlantic’s David Graham called it “a serious mistake” that “weakens the rule of law” and “will encourage those who wish to undermine elections.” Polis’s attorney general, a Democrat, and the head of the state’s county clerk association, a Republican, also criticized the move. Mother Jones’s Jeremy Schulman, meanwhile, said it was the right thing to do, arguing that “nine years is an awfully long time. She is 70 and has already been in prison for more than a year and a half.” And Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America said, “I don’t give a shit. I don’t care. I have so much to be outraged or to worry about.”But you absolutely should care—not because of the political or legal ramifications, but because she is not an anomaly. There are dozens, if not hundreds of Tina Peterses out there. And they aren’t in jail. They are your elected officials.Peters’s scheme runs the gamut from shady to very illegal, with some Hollywood espionage sprinkled in. From 2019 to 2023, she was the Mesa County clerk and recorder, a position that oversees local elections, including voter registration, candidate paperwork, polling logistics, and ballot processing. After the 2020 election, she became convinced of the conspiracy theory that the election had been rigged for Joe Biden through Dominion voting machines. In May 2021, she took a colleague’s security badge and gave it to Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer who disguised himself as a computer “nerd” to gain access to a Dominion machine, then copied its hard drive both before and after updating its software. (Peters had turned off the security cameras.) That hard-drive data was then repackaged by Mike “MyPillow” Lindell to further push the aforementioned conspiracy theory. Over the course of six months, leading up to and in the aftermath of the 2024 election, I worked for a nonprofit watchdog cataloging the election deniers and subverters who hold power at state and local levels. Tina Peters was a prominent player, but by no means the only one, or even the most shocking.At the time of the “Threats to Democracy” tracker’s publication, nearly 300 public officials—from election canvassers and county clerks to state legislators and attorneys general—had in some way attempted to overturn the 2020 election results. And that doesn’t account for the hundreds more who denied the results but stopped short of trying to subvert them.Some of these officials spread bad-faith lies about voting machines to their constituents, while others went further. Much further. On December 14, 2020—the day the Electoral College convened to certify the results of the presidential election—Republican officials in seven states that Trump lost signed fake electoral certificates claiming he had actually won. In Michigan, 16 fake electors—including a mayor, a township clerk, and multiple candidates for state office—gathered in the basement of the Republican Party headquarters, signed counterfeit paperwork declaring themselves the official electors, and tried to march on the state Capitol where the real electors were certifying the results. In Georgia, the chair of the state GOP led a secret meeting to do the same thing in the Capitol. Among the 16 fake electors was state Senator Burt Jones, who was elected as the lieutenant governor in 2023. These weren’t fringe actors screaming into the void, but elected officials trying to defraud the American public, con the U.S. Congress, and use the machinery of democracy to break it.Arizona state Senator Wendy Rogers, a Republican who was reelected in 2024, has called for violence against her political rivals at a white nationalist conference, called on Americans to “buy more ammo” while the state’s slate of electors formally cast their votes for Biden in 2020, and tried to decertify the election results years afterward. She currently chairs the Judiciary and Elections Committee in the Arizona Senate.In 2021, in Wisconsin, Racine County Sheriff Chris Schamling recommended criminal charges against five members of the state’s Elections Commission, yet refused to investigate a resident who illegally requested multiple absentee ballots. Schamling is a member of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, a group that has worked to undermine election administration across the country, and his office routinely coordinates with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.As the clerk of Macomb County, Michigan, in 2021, Anthony Forlini pursued a forensic audit of the county’s election server based on debunked election fraud claims, and in 2022 he hired a known election denier and “Stop the Steal” agitator to serve as poll recruiter.
