Officials say elections supervisor poses risk

Colorado woman, her deputy are accused in voting machine scandal.

In April, employees in the office that runs elections in western Colorado’s Mesa County got an unusual calendar invitation for an afterhours work event, a gathering at a hotel in Grand Junction. “Expectations are that all will be at the Doubletree by 5:30,” said the invite sent by a deputy to Tina Peters, the county’s chief elections official.

Speaking at the Doubletree was Douglas Frank, a physics teacher and scientist who was rapidly becoming famous among election deniers for claiming to have discovered secret algorithms used to rig the 2020 contest against Donald Trump. Frank led the crowd in a rendition of “The Star-spangled Banner” and spent the next 90 minutes alleging an elaborate conspiracy involving inflated voter rolls, fraudulent ballots and a “sixth-order polynomial,” video of the event shows. He was working for Mypillow chief executive Mike Lindell, he said, and their efforts could overturn President Joe Biden’s victory.

Being told to sit through a presentation of wild, debunked claims was “a huge slap in the face,” one Mesa County elections-division employee said of the previously unreported episode. “We put so much time and effort into making sure that everything’s done accurately,” the employee told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation. Peters, the elected county clerk, had expressed sympathy for such theories, the employee said.

In a lawsuit filed by the state’s top elections official, Peters and her deputy have been accused of sneaking someone into the county elections offices to copy the hard drives of Dominion Voting Systems machines. Those copies later surfaced online and in the hands of election deniers. The local district attorney, state prosecutors and the FBI are investigating whether criminal charges are warranted.

The events in Mesa County represent an escalation in the attacks on the nation’s voting system, one in which officials who were responsible for election security allegedly took actions that undermined that security. As baseless claims about election fraud are embraced by broad swaths of the Republican Party, experts fear that people who embrace those claims could be elected or appointed to offices where they oversee voting, potentially posing new security risks.

Experienced election administrators at the local level have been fleeing their jobs amid rising stress and threats to their personal safety.

“If these local offices become weaponized in a way that subverts the free and fair election, then we no longer live in a healthy democracy,” said Tammy Patrick, an election-administration expert and adviser to the Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan private foundation seeking to strengthen voting systems.

The suit was filed by Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat whose office supervises elections run by county clerks. It seeks to strip Peters and her deputy, Belinda Knisley, of election powers, arguing they were responsible for an “unprecedented security breach.” For that, Griswold argues, Peters can’t be permitted access to county voting equipment.

Griswold alleges an unauthorized person was given a key card and that Peters’ office falsely claimed that that person was a county employee. Security cameras in the elections offices were turned off, Griswold alleges, before Peters and the unauthorized person swiped in on May 23 — a Sunday, the day the hard drive was copied for the first time.

Neither Peters nor Knisley agreed to be interviewed for this story, and neither answered questions sent by email. Their lawyers have argued that at worst the two women committed “several technical violations of election regulations, none of which justify removal of an elected official.” They have said the two had the right to bring in a consultant and never authorized confidential data to be published online.