{"id":44626,"date":"2021-09-20T19:51:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-21T01:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/mesa-county-clerk-fights-to-keep-her-job-in-new-court-filing\/"},"modified":"2021-09-21T01:51:00","modified_gmt":"2021-09-21T01:51:00","slug":"mesa-county-clerk-fights-to-keep-her-job-in-new-court-filing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/mesa-county-clerk-fights-to-keep-her-job-in-new-court-filing\/","title":{"rendered":"Mesa County clerk fights to keep her job in new court filing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"A
A ballot drop box outside the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder\u2019s offices in Grand Junction on Aug. 26. (Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News)<\/span>Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who is embroiled in an election security scandal, has denied wrongdoing and requested to remain in her role overseeing elections this fall.<\/p>\n

Her attorney said Peters was well within her legal right to share information about the county\u2019s Dominion Voting Systems equipment with a non-employee during an annual system upgrade.<\/p>\n

Data from the machines were featured in screenshots shared by QAnon supporters and released by the right-wing website Gateway Pundit, by those eager to cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election.<\/p>\n

A court filing in response to an effort to remove Peters from overseeing elections in Mesa, said the leak of information was not Peters\u2019 intent, but rather she was trying to preserve records and to better analyze how the state conducted system updates.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, there was an unauthorized release of information on one or more publicly available websites,\u201d said a filing in District Court in Mesa County from attorney Scott Gessler.<\/p>\n

In the filing, Gessler, a Republican and former Colorado secretary of state, said the decision by current Secretary of State Jena Griswold to file a lawsuit to remove Peters from overseeing this fall\u2019s election as a result was \u201cwholly disproportionate\u201d and violates Colorado law, \u201cwhich vests local control over elections in a locally-elected official.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mesa County\u2019s district attorney and the FBI are investigating allegations that Peters gave an unauthorized person access to the Dominion election management software and passwords, but no criminal charges have been filed against Peters or anyone else in the dispute.<\/p>\n

\"Mesa
Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters reads an update on the June 30, 2020, election in Grand Junction. (McKenzie Lange\/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel via AP)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

After the revelations about the data\u2019s unauthorized release, Peters, who has become a favorite of election conspiracy theorists around the country, appeared at a conference of election conspiracy adherents, and then went into hiding. She said she feared for her personal safety.<\/p>\n

Peters returned to Mesa County earlier this week to attend a rally. She has now created a website to raise money for her legal defense. She vowed to fight and said, \u201cWe can take back our country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSome powerful people don\u2019t want us to look at the facts,\u201d she said. \u201cIn fact, they\u2019re trying to remove me as the Mesa County recorder just for doing my job,\u201d Peters said.<\/p>\n

Peters, who is a Republican, called the state\u2019s efforts politically motivated. Griswold is a Democrat.<\/p>\n

\u201cI need your support,\u201d Peters told a few hundred people at a church in Grand Junction on Thursday evening.<\/p>\n

She had not been in Colorado for more than a month and said she was working remotely.<\/p>\n

Griswold\u2019s lawsuit seeks to officially prevent Peters from having any role in the county\u2019s upcoming fall election because of the security breach.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know that that information was posted by an extreme conspiracy theorist,\u201d Griswold said.<\/p>\n

One reason why the Mesa County security breach is particularly significant is because it uses equipment from Dominion Voting Systems, one of the country\u2019s biggest vendors of election equipment. The company, with headquarters in Denver, is also at the center of many of the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election that claim the ballot counting was somehow rigged against former President Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

Dominion is pursuing a number of defamation lawsuits against both pro-Trump news outlets and Trump advisers over the conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

Peters said she did allow someone outside of her office to capture images because she was concerned Griswold\u2019s office would not preserve records during the annual upgrade to the electronic voting machines.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026 in response to her concerns, she retained a consultant to image the hard drive of the county\u2019s electronic vote-tabulating equipment,\u201d according to Peters\u2019 filing.<\/p>\n

The filing said the state\u2019s emergency rule to ban consultants from the process was only issued after the incident occurred.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe new rule prevents clerks and recorders from hiring non-employee consultants with the necessary expertise to evaluate, audit or otherwise ensure electronic vote-tabulating equipment, and other election equipment, functions correctly and in accordance with Colorado law,\u201d the filing said.<\/p>\n

Peters said the images were meant to determine whether election records were destroyed and evaluate the electronic equipment that tabulates votes from paper ballots.<\/p>\n

\u201cFollowing the 2020 election, a sizeable portion of Mesa County voters raised serious questions about the reliability and accuracy of Mesa County\u2019s electronic vote tabulating equipment,\u201d the filing said.<\/p>\n

No meaningful discrepancies have been found anywhere related to the presidential election. While losing Colorado, Donald Trump won the balloting in Mesa County with nearly 57,000 of the nearly 91,000 ballots cast.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for Griswold\u2019s office did not immediately return a request for comment about Peters\u2019 filing.<\/p>\n

Colorado\u2019s audits show that there were no problems with the state\u2019s election. In fact, election officials from around the country consider the state to have some of the best-run elections in the nation. There are paper ballots, which are preserved, and post-election audits to make sure the tallies match the machines count.<\/p>\n

The legal filing also asks a judge to reinstate Peters\u2019 deputy, Belinda Knisley.<\/p>\n

Knisley was charged with second-degree burglary and a cybercrime over entering the building while she was suspended, pending an investigation into unprofessional and inappropriate conduct in the workplace.<\/p>\n

\u201cDespite Knisley\u2019s request for additional information, neither the head of Human Resources nor the County Administrator have provided any details as to the alleged \u2018inappropriate\u2019 behavior,\u201d the filing said.<\/p>\n

Peters was first elected in 2018, and her tenure as the top local election official in the rural county has occasionally been controversial. In February 2020, her office admitted to finding 574 uncounted ballots from a 2019 election, leading to a state probe and calls for her resignation.<\/p>\n

The state told CPR News an evidentiary hearing on the lawsuit to remove Peters is scheduled for Sept. 30 and briefs must be submitted to the court by Sept. 27.<\/p>\n

To read more stories by Colorado Public Radio, visit www.cpr.org<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Embattled election official says her removal was an overreach by Colorado secretary of state<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[488,133,28,1722,1621],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-civil","tag-courts","tag-headlines","tag-regional-elections","tag-voting"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44626"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}