Newsman: A grand jury has indicted a Colorado county clerk, Tina Peters, and her deputy on a laundry list of charges related to an election security breach in her office last summer that was influenced by former President Donald Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election. In another event,the elections administrator in Harris County, Texas, announced Tuesday that she had submitted her resignation, amid a mail-in ballot counting discrepancy in election night results.
Isabel Longoria, who since 2020 has overseen elections in Harris County, which includes Houston, said her resignation would be effective July 1.
The charges against Colorado county clerk, Tina Peters come as election workers around the U.S. face death threats amid a national disinformation campaign that has falsely alleged wide scale election tampering in 2020. Peters’ case is particularly worrisome to many who run elections as a sign that insiders might act upon those conspiracy theories, further undermining confidence in the voting process.
In a joint statement announcing the indictment, Mesa County District Attorney Dan Rubinstein and Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said, “This investigation is ongoing, and other defendants may be charged as we learn more information. We remind everyone that these are allegations at this point and that they are presumed innocent until proven guilty.”
Peters, who’s the county clerk and recorder in Mesa County, in western Colorado, faces 10 counts, including seven felony charges and three misdemeanors. The felony charges include attempting to influence a public servant, identity theft, criminal impersonation and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. The misdemeanors include first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failure to comply with the requirements of the secretary of state.
Her deputy, Belinda Knisley, has been indicted on six counts, including attempt to influence a public servant, conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation, violation of duty, and failure to comply with the requirements of the secretary of state.
The pair is accused of helping an unauthorized person make copies of sensitive voting-machine hard drives and attend an annual software update. Information from the machines and secure passwords were later shared with election conspiracy theorists online. Shortly after the data was leaked, Peters appeared at an event put on by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the leading promoters of the conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was rigged.
“Something didn’t seem right in our county from years ago to the 2020 election. And they wanted answers. And I said, ‘You know what? If there’s a there there, we’ll find it.’ And I’ve made that pledge to the citizens of Mesa County and all over Colorado,” said Peters during the 2021 event.
The maker of the equipment, Dominion Voting Systems, has been the focus of false conspiracy theories claiming it helped steal the 2020 election for President Biden. Dominion is suing a number of the most prominent proponents of those claims for defamation.
The indictment argues that Peters and Knisley together lied to other Mesa County staff, as well as workers in the secretary of state’s office. It also alleges that the two committed identity theft against a local man, Gerald “Jerry” Wood, in order to give someone — the indictment doesn’t say who — access to the hard drives and the software update in his name.
It states that the women “devised and executed a deceptive scheme which was designed to influence public servants, breach security protocols, exceed permissible access to voting equipment, and set in motion the eventual distribution of confidential information to unauthorized people.”
Peters has long maintained that she has every right to look into potential election fraud and was simply responding to the concerns of her constituents.
“I have attempted to investigate the results of the elections, a duty that I have to my constituents,” she told Colorado Public Radio. “They were coming to me.”
Peters recently announced she is running for secretary of state against incumbent Democrat Jena Griswold, who has been a driving force in the investigation against her. Griswold first said her office would look into a possible security breach last August.
“Every eligible Coloradan – Republican, Democrat, and Unaffiliated alike – has the right to make their voice heard in safe, accessible, and secure elections,” said Griswold in a statement after the indictment was announced.
“To do that, we need election administrators who are committed to following the law and election rules. Officials tasked with carrying out elections do so in public trust and must be held accountable when they abuse their power or position.”
On the other hand,the elections administrator in Harris County, Texas, announced Tuesday that she had submitted her resignation, amid a mail-in ballot counting discrepancy in election night results.
Isabel Longoria, who since 2020 has overseen elections in Harris County, which includes Houston, said her resignation would be effective July 1.
Longoria’s resignation comes amid backlash over issues with the March 1 primary in her county, Texas’ most populous, which included damaged ballots that delayed the reporting of results and a vote discrepancy that has left thousands of ballots out of the unofficial primary results.
Before Longoria announced her departure, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who supported the creation of the elections administrator role and had praised Longoria as the best person for the role in October 2020, had alluded to a possible replacement earlier on Tuesday, saying she had “spoken with administrator Longoria and I’ve expressed my desire for a change in leadership.”
Hidalgo said that she, along with the Elections Commission, the county clerk and the district clerk, would find new leadership “only after a thorough search.”
The Harris County elections administrator position was created in July 2020 following a party-line vote, when Democrats on the Central Count Committee voted to transfer the voter registration duties of the tax assessor-collector and the election management role of the county clerk to an independent office. The position is appointed by the Harris County Elections Commission, which is Democratically controlled.
Longoria’s announced resignation comes just days after she said that about 10,000 mail-in ballots — approximately 6,000 Democratic and 4,000 Republican — had not been included in the final unofficial primary election results. On Saturday, Longoria said in a statement that the Central Count Committee, the body that oversees the tallying of ballots in Harris County, had scanned the votes but didn’t transfer them to the unofficial results. Longoria added that the slip-up had occurred between 1 and 4 a.m. Wednesday, hours after the polls had closed in Texas. Overall, more than 358,000 ballots were cast in Harris County for the primary election, of which more than 327,000 were cast in person, according to unofficial totals.
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The discrepancy was first noticed by the Secretary of State’s Office on Friday night, when the new reconciliation forms, mandated as part of the voting law, showed a significant difference between the number of voters and the number of ballots, according to Sam Taylor, the communications director for Secretary of State John Scott.
“While we understand the seriousness of this error, the ability to identify and correct this issue is a result of a lengthy, rigorous process and is a positive example of the process ultimately working as it should,” Longoria said over the weekend.
The votes will be added to the final count at a meeting on Tuesday.
Hidalgo said the controversy should not put the legitimacy of the primary election results in question.
“We have no evidence to suggest that the full count, once certified, that will happen later this week is not accurate,” said Hidalgo. “We don’t need to go there, because that tears down trust in our electoral system.”
The Harris County Democratic Party has called for a post-election review following the revelations.
