Tina Peters, recently released from a Colorado jail, and President Donald Trump teamed up a few days ahead of the United States’ 250th birthday to declare from the Oval Office that America’s democracy is dead.
On June 30, primary election day in Colorado, Trump a photo of Tina Peters standing beside him while he sits behind the Resolute Desk: “She caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud. They didn’t want her out there speaking to the Media. She knows that the Voting Machines are RIGGED, that the Mail In Ballots are a DISASTER, and that our Elections are very Dangerous and Corrupt at a time when, with the Threat of Communism, we must be very wise and careful!”
The president of the United States just told Americans ahead of the November midterm elections that ballot machines are “rigged,” so Democrats will win elections.
If Trump’s statement was true, it would mean America’s republic is over, and we are no longer an independent nation ruled by self-governance, but an autocracy ruled by whoever controls the rigged election system.
According to Trump, democracy died in America when he lost the 2020 election. Trump explains his victory in November 2024 by telling his supporters that his vote tally was so overwhelming that Democrats had to undo their rigged machines and let him win.
Fortunately for those of us living in the most free country in the world, Trump is lying. America’s democracy is not dead, and we will show below all the evidence in Colorado that our elections are still free and fair.
Colorado is a hotbed of election conspiracy theories sparked by Trump in 2020 and fueled by local elected officials like Peters, Joe Oltman, Heidi Ganahl and Scott Bottoms. We want to take time to walk Coloradans through the evidence that proves Peters is lying when she says on her podcast, Truth Matters: “Once your ballot goes into an election machine to count your vote — your vote is determined by the machine. The machines are programmed to achieve the measure. Much like a vending machine, when you purchase a Pepsi but a Diet Coke drops down. It is not what you chose, but your selection was changed by the machine. All votes need to be cast on paper ballots. Each ballot needs to be hand-counted.”
First, Colorado does use paper ballots. Every single vote cast in this state is retained as a paper ballot. Yes, some counties do use voting machines at their voter service centers, but those machines print out a paper ballot that the voter reviews before casting.
Second, there is ample evidence that the voting machine count is an accurate reflection of voters’ selections. And there is a shocking dearth of evidence to the contrary, given how ardently Peters and her supporters have clung to this narrative for the past six years.
Voters put their money in, select Pepsi and get Pepsi. Here is how we know.
Every election, every ballot is available for public inspection. That wasn’t always the case, but Coloradans over the years, starting in the early 2010s, . Using these precedents, Coloradans who believe the election machines are making up fake votes for Democrats have paid thousands of dollars for access to Colorado’s paper ballots, and remarkably have never provided results counter to what ballot counting machines produce. Heidi Ganahl, who lost the 2022 race for governor, famously reviewed 85,000 of the 195,000 ballots cast in Douglas County and , presumably because it was statistically close to the actual results in Douglas County.
But we don’t have to take the lack of evidence as evidence.
Every election in this state goes through a “risk limiting audit” where a random sample of ballots is pulled and reviewed. Election judges from both political parties record the votes they see on a paper ballot and then compare those results to the results tabulated by the voting machine. Counties use independent software developed by the state for the audit. For election machines to be conducting fraud and then covering up that fraud during the audit would require an incredible amount of coordination and corruption.
Peters claims that she did find evidence that the voting machines in Colorado are corrupt and that data she presented at a conference hosted by My Pillow executive Mike Lindell proved Democrats changed election results. This “evidence” was obtained while she was the clerk and recorder in Mesa County through the commission of her felony and misdemeanor offenses, for which she received a nine-year sentence in a Colorado jail. Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, mercifully reduced Peters’ sentence to time served, and she was released just in time to appear with Trump and cast doubt on the June 30 elections.
In a recent Facebook post, Peters wrote: “For a moment, let’s assume the Forensic Reports were obtained illegally (although they were not) — it does not change the fact that election records WERE altered. A staggering 29,000 election records.”
Those reports definitely do not show that 29,000 election records were changed. Even if it did, Peters was accessing the report months after the election was certified. What the reports do show is that during a software upgrade, 29,000 entries of software code were deleted and replaced with new code. Former Mesa County clerk and recorder, trusted local Republican Sheila Reiner, has repeatedly emphasized that .
Peters also challenged the 2022 primary election results when she lost to another Republican in the primary for secretary of state. The recount, which ran state-wide ballots back through the election machines, did give Peters 13 more votes but certainly did not prove fraud. Recounts often vary from initial vote tallies by a few votes because of operator error recasting the ballot and because voters’ markings on ballots are sometimes unclear to the machine — think hanging chad, only the Scantron version.
Peters, of course, said that since ballots weren’t hand-counted, the results were — again — subjected to fraudulent voter machines altering the tally. We wish at this point that the state had just conceded to Peters’ demands and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to hand-count the ballots, but we also know it wouldn’t matter. No amount of evidence will dissuade Peters. When hand recounts are conducted, election deniers latch onto hand-count methodology and observers to allege the process was also rigged.
For example, the Republican clerk in Elbert County is also leery of election results and did a hand count of the presidential results in his county in 2020. The results of the hand count were 3 ballots away from the machine count.
The Elbert County clerk did a hand count in 2022, too, and issued the following statement:
“In December of 2022, teams of bipartisan election judges and staff conducted the hand count. Four races were selected to be hand-tallied. Those four races were US Senate, CD 4, Governor and Secretary of State. The results of the hand count confirmed the machine results. There were no scanning errors by the system. Three duplication errors were found and which resulted in a net plus vote for Governor Polis. The other three races resulted in both the hand count and machine count to be identical. Completing this task is yet another example of Elbert County Elections going beyond the bare minimums to confirm and assure Elbert County citizens as to the accuracy and veracity (of) our Elbert County election results.”
Election deniers counter this evidence by saying the cheaters who have manipulated the voting machines put honest counting software in Elbert County in 2020 and 2022.
We are exhausted from playing whack-a-mole with these ever-evolving accounts of fraud, all of which are based on suspicion and not evidence. Even if hand-counts were implemented statewide, we know that the next attack is to imply that the machines create fake voters out of thin air for the preferred candidate. It’s what Colorado’s errant professor John Eastman claimed at the Save America rally just before rioters breached the Capitol to prevent Vice President Mike Pence from certifying the 2020 election results.
We know this “fake voter” and “fake ballot” conspiracy is false because in Colorado, it is public record who participated in each election. Those names and addresses match the number of votes cast. Groups like the Electoral Integrity Project have spent countless hours going door to door trying to find fake voters on those rolls and have yet to present a single case of a fake voter. What they did find is that have plagued elections for two centuries. Journalists and election officials have also spent countless hours searching these rolls looking for proof of rampant voter fraud. Voter fraud does and has occurred, but only as isolated incidents that have been prosecuted.
Our democracy will not last another 250 years if we don’t do everything in our power to knock down these outlandish claims. American voters can go to the polls in November with confidence that Democrats are not controlling the election results through a vast conspiracy of fraud.
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