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Tina Peters, the former Mesa County Clerk who became one of the most recognizable names in the election integrity movement, was found not guilty on Wednesday in a Colorado Department of Corrections disciplinary hearing after being attacked by another inmate inside La Vista Correctional Facility. The prison board ruled that Peters acted in self-defense after being cornered and assaulted by a 29-year-old inmate in a maintenance closet. It is a small but significant victory for a woman who, according to millions of Americans, should never have been behind bars in the first place.
The incident occurred in mid-January when Peters was inside a maintenance closet filling a water unit. According to a statement released by Peters’s team, another inmate approached her in the confined space and began striking her. Video of the altercation was widely circulated, and what it showed was unmistakable — Peters was trapped, outnumbered in a physical sense, and responded the way any person would when backed into a corner with no avenue of escape. The prison board, after reviewing the evidence, agreed. “Today, reason and truth prevailed,” Peters said following the ruling. “I was found not guilty. The Department of Corrections fairly considered the evidence and concluded that I defended myself. I’m thankful that the Board carefully considered the evidence and was not swayed by media coverage.”
There were unsubstantiated reports after the altercation that the inmate who attacked Peters was released on parole shortly afterward. If true, that detail raises its own set of uncomfortable questions about who is being protected inside the Colorado corrections system and who is being targeted. But even without that detail, the broader picture is damning enough on its own.
Tina Peters is serving a nine-year sentence — later reduced on appeal — after being convicted on charges related to her efforts to preserve election data from Dominion Voting Systems machines in Mesa County. She believed, and continues to believe, that the data was being improperly handled and that the public had a right to see what was on those machines. For that belief, she was prosecuted with a ferocity typically reserved for violent offenders. The judge in her case, Matthew Barrett, delivered a blistering sentencing statement that many legal observers found disproportionate to the charges. Peters was treated not as a county clerk who made a controversial decision about public records, but as some kind of existential threat to the democratic order.
That is the context in which this prison altercation and subsequent not-guilty finding must be understood. Peters has been a target since the moment she began asking questions that powerful people did not want asked. The state of Colorado, under the leadership of officials who have made their political loyalties abundantly clear, has pursued her with a relentlessness that tells you everything about what they are really afraid of. They are not afraid of Tina Peters. They are afraid of what happens when ordinary citizens start looking too closely at the machinery of elections and refusing to accept that everything is working exactly as it should.
The election integrity movement has produced its share of figures who have been subjected to legal and personal persecution for the crime of asking inconvenient questions. Peters stands near the top of that list. She was a county clerk — not a politician, not a media personality, not someone with a massive legal defense fund. She was a public servant who believed her oath required her to preserve records that she thought were being destroyed. Whether you agree with every decision she made, the punishment has been grotesquely out of proportion to the conduct. A woman in her sixties, sitting in a Colorado prison, being attacked by another inmate, and then having to defend herself in a disciplinary hearing for the privilege of not being punished further — that is not justice. That is what happens when the state decides to make an example of someone.
President Trump has spoken favorably of Peters in the past, and the broader MAGA movement has rallied around her case as emblematic of the two-tiered justice system that has become impossible to deny. The same prosecutors and judges who let violent criminals walk free on bail are the ones who ensured that a grandmother who copied election data would spend years behind bars. The same system that released Mohamed Bailor Jalloh — a convicted ISIS supporter — from federal prison in time for him to carry out a terror attack at Old Dominion University this very week, is the same system that keeps Tina Peters locked up for questioning an election.
Peters’s not-guilty finding on the assault charge is a reminder that even inside the system designed to crush her, the truth has a way of surfacing when the evidence is examined honestly. The video did not lie. The board could not ignore what it showed. And for once, a process worked the way it was supposed to for Tina Peters. The larger fight — for her freedom, for her vindication, and for the principle that Americans have a right to transparent elections — continues. Her supporters can follow updates at tinapeters.us.
If the system can lock up a grandmother for preserving election records while releasing convicted terrorists back onto the streets, what does that tell you about whose interests the system is really designed to protect?
Providence watches over the bold.
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