Colorado governor commutes sentence of former elections clerk Tina Peters after Trump pressure

2026-05-15T21:09:07Z DENVER (AP) — Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Friday commuted the sentence of election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters following pressure from President Donald Trump, the latest instance of the president using his powers to reward those who echoed his baseless claims of mass fraud as the cause of his 2020 loss. Trump has championed the case of Peters, a 70-year-old former county clerk who was sentenced to nine years behind bars after being convicted in a scheme to make a copy of her county’s election computer system. She gets released June 1. In April, a Colorado appeals court ordered Peters to be resentenced because it said the judge who sent her to prison wrongly punished her for speaking out about election fraud, a decision praised by Polis. The court upheld her convictions though. Peters has been serving her sentence at a prison in Pueblo after being convicted in 2024 by jurors in Mesa County, a Republican stronghold that supported Trump. Peters snuck in an outside computer expert, an associate of MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell , to make a copy of her county’s Dominion Voting Systems election computer server as state officials updated it in 2021. After Peters joined Lindell onstage at a “cybersymposium” that promised to reveal proof of election rigging, video and photos of the upgrade, including passwords, were posted online. Peters was convicted of state, not federal, crimes, which put her beyond the reach of Trump’s pardon power that he used to free those convicted of crimes for the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. But the president still championed her cause. (