Election denier Tina Peters will get clemency after admitting she ‘made a mistake,’ Colorado’s Democratic governor says

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, Marshall Cohen, CNN

(CNN) — Tina Peters, the Republican former election clerk imprisoned for crimes related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election, will receive clemency from Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jared Polis and soon be released from custody, Polis exclusively told CNN.

The decision followed a previously unreleased statement in Peters’ clemency application, obtained by CNN from Polis’ office, in which Peters acknowledged for the first time since her 2024 conviction that she “made a mistake” and “misled” Colorado election officials.

Polis said in an interview Friday that he was cutting Peters’ prison sentence in half, reducing it to 4.5 years. He said that meant she could be paroled within a month, based on the time she has already served behind bars and Colorado’s early-release rules.

A jury in conservative-leaning Mesa County convicted Peters in 2024 of conspiring with fellow election deniers to breach her county’s election systems in hopes of proving President Donald Trump’s baseless 2020 voter-fraud claims.

Trump has waged a long pressure campaign against Colorado over Peters’ incarceration. She is the last Trump ally still in prison for 2020 election-related crimes.

“I made a mistake four years ago,” Peters said in the statement released Friday. “I misled the secretary of state when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. Going forward, I will make sure that my actions always follow the law.”

Polis said he agrees with a recent appeals court ruling which found that the trial judge improperly punished Peters for her protected speech about the 2020 election, telling CNN he’d like others to come to the same conclusion as the court. But he knows, especially among Democrats in his state and beyond, that’s going to be tough.

“I hope that Democrats don’t sacrifice our deeply held belief in free speech because of political expediency or disregard for what people are saying,” Polis said. “There should be no consideration of what we say, how unpopular it is, how inaccurate it is in sentencing or in criminal proceedings.”

CNN is reaching out to Peters’ team for comment.

Polis said he also heard from Trump privately in addition to the president’s public posts demanding Peters, 70, be released. He said that the president often gets facts wrong about Peters, her crime and his ability to pardon her for state-level offenses.

“He gets her age wrong. He gets what she did wrong. My focus was doing what’s right and then looking at the merits of the case,” Polis said.

He says Peters committed a crime, and he was personally disgusted with what Peters said about the 2020 election, “but we have to make sure our justice system is blind and fair.”

The history of Peters’ case

Witnesses testified at Peters’ trial that in 2021, she gave people affiliated with pro-Trump conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell unauthorized access to the election offices in Mesa County, where she was the clerk. Witnesses said they made copies of sensitive election data so they could audit the 2020 results.

Until the statement released Friday, Peters had denied wrongdoing and maintained for years that she was trying to preserve election records, as required by federal law.

Last month, a state appeals court upheld Peters’ criminal convictions. However, it ordered the trial judge to re-sentence her, finding that he improperly based part of the punishment on Peters’ protected speech about elections, violating her First Amendment rights.

A date for a new sentencing hearing hadn’t been set yet. Peters was eligible for parole in 2028. CNN has reported that, even without clemency, Colorado law could have made Peters eligible to move into a halfway house or a similar arrangement as soon as this November with good behavior.

Through her allies, Peters had continued promoting debunked conspiracies about election-rigging from prison.

Her official website still says she is the victim of “politically motivated” prosecutions designed to “silence” her for “exposing what she believed were critical flaws in the election system.” Her social media feed includes unfounded claims from supposed informants who claimed American voting machines can flip votes using technology from Venezuela.

Her account reshared a post Tuesday from a radio host who urged Trump to “INVADE COLORADO if you have to” and “do whatever needs to be done” to free Peters from prison.

The governor has seen the posts and what Peters has continued to say. That’s not a reason to keep her behind bars, he said.

“I hope that she’s no longer a martyr, that she is just another person who believes in conspiracies on the street after this,” Polis said. “I hope she doesn’t believe in conspiracies, but I’m not holding my breath.”

What her release could mean

Still, Peters’ impending release is a victory for Trump and the right-wing election denier movement, which hails her as a hero who was unjustly prosecuted.

In a lawsuit against the Trump administration, Colorado officials accused the administration of a “revenge campaign” that included closing a Colorado-based climate lab, denying federal disaster assistance requests from the state, yanking federal transportation funds and threatening to withhold federal food assistance for low-income families.

Trump also vetoed a bill for a Colorado water project and moved US Space Command from Colorado Springs to Alabama. And in February, Trump tried to exclude Polis and another Democratic governor from what is traditionally a bipartisan gathering of governors at the White House.

The White House says these decisions were well-founded and legally supported.

Trump issued a symbolic federal pardon for Peters in December, but Polis is the only person who could let Peters out of prison because she was convicted of state charges.

Polis pointed out that the commutation decision is not a pardon because he believes she broke the law and wants her to live with that felony on her record.

Polis’ term ends in January, and he has bucked his party on some key issues in recent years. The Democratic Party has been in near-universal condemnation of the effort to argue Trump’s 2020 election loss was fraudulent.

Polis sloughed off talk of how the decision might affect a 2028 presidential run that some have speculated he might make.

“This has nothing to do with that,” he said. “I think we need to get past the divisive rhetoric of today and understand that just because you’re on the unpopular side of an argument – if you’re a person who believes in conservative things in a liberal state or liberal things in conservative state or conspiracy things in any state or that the earth is flat – you have that free speech.”

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