This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at cpr.org.
Former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters was released from a women’s correctional facility in Pueblo on Monday as ordered by the governor.
The Colorado Department of Corrections did not provide specific details ahead of her release, and Peters was not seen by the dozen reporters and photographers stationed outside the La Vista Correctional Facility.
Peters was convicted of several felonies and misdemeanors and sentenced in 2024 to nearly nine years in prison for her role in tampering with Mesa county’s voting machines months after the 2020 presidential election in search of evidence of election rigging. Democratic Gov. Jared Polis commuted her sentence last month, in a controversial decision that led to immediate backlash from state officials.
Hours after her release she appeared on Steve Bannon’s podcast WarRoom where she discussed the difficulty of serving time behind bars.
“It's been quite the ordeal, but I really want to thank God for his faithfulness and getting me through it,” she said. “And it's been, I think probably for me, Steve, to impress upon every person out there how hard it is to lose your liberty, how easy it is to lose your liberty, but how hard it is to endure it.”
Peters is appealing her conviction to the Colorado Supreme Court and said she will spend the next few weeks recuperating with family. She has said she will also do her best through legal means to support election integrity but she continued to promote false theories about voting machines that have been debunked by election audits, lawsuits, and hand recounts.
“I know that the Democrats are going to cheat and no one's really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for,” she said. “And that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped.”
Mesa County used voting machines by Dominion Voting Systems, a company with U.S. headquarters in Denver that provided machines throughout the country. The company won settlements from several news organizations - including $787 million from Fox News - for false accusations that the machines could be manipulated to flip votes. The company has been sold and is now Liberty Vote.
Allies of President Donald Trump have hailed Peters as a hero, and Trump has repeatedly pushed for her release, often writing “FREE TINA” on social media.
She said she only wrote two letters in prison, both to President Trump.
“I want to tell him thank you for the efforts he put in to draw attention also to my situation,” she said.
Gov. Polis said while he disagreed with Peters’ “nutty” beliefs he thought Peters’ sentence was overly harsh and inappropriate and that he agreed with a decision from the Colorado court of appeals that her election denying beliefs impacted the length of her sentence. The appeals court ordered her re-sentenced, but Polis’ commutation negates that.
“She committed a crime,” Polis told CPR News on May 15, the day he commuted her sentence. Polis made it clear he was not issuing a pardon. He said said Peters deserves to be a felon for life
“The issue is really whether her free speech, her incorrect and free speech around election conspiracy theories was held against her in sentencing,” he said.
In an extraordinary move the Democratic state party censured Polis and banned him from speaking at party functions and called the commutation reckless.
County clerks say her actions have made their work more challenging, and that giving her a megaphone on the national stage will only make things worse.
“She’s going to continue her campaign against voting systems, which is fueled by lies and disinformation. And so all of that disinformation really has an aggregating effect where it goes out. It brainwashes people. They think there's problems with these machines,” said Matt Crane, the Republican chair of the Colorado County Clerks Association.
