https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/us/politics/tina-peters-guilty-voting-machine-tampering.htmlTina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was convicted on Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald J. Trump.
After nearly five hours of deliberations, a jury in Grand Junction found Ms. Peters guilty of seven criminal charges connected to her efforts to breach a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The jury determined that Ms. Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Mr. Trump’s defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Ms. Peters is set to be sentenced on Oct. 3 and could face multiple years in prison.
The conviction of Ms. Peters, who has become a celebrity in the world of those who have denied that Mr. Trump lost the last presidential election, is the first time that prosecutors have managed to hold a local election official accountable for a security breach of a voting machine used in 2020. It also suggests the extent to which allies of Mr. Trump, including those in public office, went to discredit his loss.