Indicted Colorado clerk Tina Peters pays for recount in primary loss for secretary of state

By Andy Rose, Paul LeBlanc and Jeremy Harlan, CNN

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a leading election denier who lost last month’s Republican primary for secretary of state, has paid the required amount for a recount of the contest.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that it “received and accepted the required funds for a discretionary statewide recount,” which the office told CNN cost Peters $255,912.33.

“The recounts will be conducted in accordance with the law, and will be finished by August 4,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement Thursday. The official results of the Secretary of State Republican primary show Peters trailing leading candidate Pam Anderson by 14 percentage points.

A proponent of former President Donald Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories, Peters is accused of violating security procedures for Mesa County voting equipment, which allegedly resulted in confidential information being posted online.

An arrest warrant was issued for Peters last week after she was accused of violating a judge’s order to have “no contact with employees from the Clerk and Records Office.” An email from Peters, which was obtained by CNN, was sent to the elections supervisor in Mesa County — along with several other counties — to inform them of her recount plans.

Peters turned herself in, and her attorney, Harvey Steinberg, told CNN last week that she was released on $1,000 bond.

Only a week earlier, Peters had faced another bench warrant for violating bond by traveling out of state without the court’s permission. That warrant was rescinded after Steinberg told the judge that he was unaware of that bond restriction and had not informed Peters.

She was originally indicted by a grand jury after prosecutors said she and her deputies allegedly facilitated a security breach in May 2021. The breach resulted in confidential voting machine logins, and forensic images of their hard drives, being published in a QAnon-affiliated Telegram channel in early August 2021. She has denied any wrongdoing.

In May, after a lawsuit brought by Griswold — a separate legal proceeding — a district judge stripped Peters of her duties overseeing this year’s elections in Mesa County.

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