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Newsletter — Issue 13 — May 21, 2026
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This newsletter has been published by Engage Colorado.
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In Support of Governor Polis's Commutation of Tina Peters
This Engage Colorado Newsletter reflects the personal opinions of Dan Caruso, written with the support of the Caruso Ventures team. The Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future Coalition did not review and has not endorsed this Engage Colorado Newsletter.
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On Friday, Governor Jared Polis commuted the prison sentence of former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters from nine years to approximately four and a half years. She becomes eligible for parole on June 1.
The reaction was nearly unanimous in its opposition. Attorney General Phil Weiser called the decision "mind-boggling and wrong as a matter of basic justice." Senator Michael Bennet "vehemently" disagreed. Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the commutation "would validate and embolden the election denial movement, and leave a dark, dangerous imprint on American democracy." Colorado's Democratic legislative leadership lined up against the Governor. The Mesa County District Attorney — a Republican who jointly prosecuted the case — joined them. The Colorado County Clerks Association's executive director, Matt Crane, said the Association's members were "furious, disgusted, and deeply disappointed."
I did not follow Tina Peters' case closely at the time it unfolded. My understanding of the underlying facts and timeline has been built over the past few days — triggered by Governor Polis's commutation and the public reaction to it, and assembled largely through dialogue with the AI research tool Claude. My intent is to accurately represent the facts. If I am mistaken, please correct me.
Having read the Governor's stated reasons, examined the underlying facts of the case, and considered the constitutional issues already raised by Colorado's own appellate court, I believe Governor Polis made the right call.
As I do my best to apply the same standards of fairness, proportionality, and institutional integrity without regard to political influence, I arrive at four takeaways.
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Takeaway One
The Governor took action with rare executive independence — against the unified opposition of his own party, and despite the negative optics of receiving pressure from President Trump — and deserves credit for it.
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Takeaway Two
Tina Peters violated her duty as Mesa County Clerk. She was properly investigated, prosecuted, and convicted, and a prison sentence was appropriate.
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Takeaway Three
But the length of her sentence — nine years for a first-time, nonviolent offender — was not just. The law was not applied evenly: the sentence, and the reactions to it, appear to have been influenced by political viewpoints. The Colorado Court of Appeals threw the sentence out in April for exactly that reason.
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Takeaway Four
And the State of Colorado appears not to have promptly investigated and appropriately addressed the underlying election-security questions her case raised. What actually drove her to act, and what was — and was not — investigated on the merits, remain open questions.
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This raises a difficult counterfactual. Had the State of Colorado addressed the questions Peters was raising — promptly, transparently, and on the merits — would she have taken the actions she did? Did she overreact to what may have been, to her, very legitimate concerns that were not getting answered? And why has the news reporting and political reaction not engaged seriously with what appear to be legitimate concerns about how the State of Colorado handled this matter?
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1. Appreciation for the Governor
Governor Polis took this action against the unified opposition of his own party. His Attorney General opposed it. His Secretary of State opposed it. His party's nominee for his own job opposed it. Colorado's Democratic legislative leadership opposed it. President Trump had publicly demanded Peters' release, and the politics of being seen to comply with that demand would reflect negatively on Polis. He did it anyway.
That deserves recognition.
Like many Coloradans, I have grown accustomed in 2026 to elected officials whose decisions are shaped almost entirely by what their own party expects of them. The Governor's commutation of Tina Peters was, by any reasonable measure, the least politically convenient decision available to him. He could have done nothing and let the appellate-ordered resentencing run its course.
His stated reasons are sound:
- A first-time, nonviolent, 70-year-old offender with documented health concerns.
- A sentence the Colorado Court of Appeals had already thrown out in April as constitutionally defective — finding that the original sentence punished Peters for her speech rather than her conduct.
- An offender who, according to Governor Polis's commutation letter, "demonstrated taking responsibility for [her] crimes, and a commitment to follow the law going forward."
- A principle — "justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly" — that most Coloradans, across the political spectrum, would agree with in any other context.
I do not think every governor would have done what Polis did. I do think it was the right thing to do, on the merits. I commend him for the willingness to do it under pressure.
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2. To Be Clear About What Tina Peters Did
The commutation is not, and must not be read as, a vindication of Tina Peters' conduct.
In May of 2021, Peters violated her sworn duty as Mesa County Clerk. She ordered the surveillance cameras in her office's secure elections facility turned off. She allowed an unauthorized outsider — a national Stop-the-Steal movement figure with no government role — into the secure area using a falsified employee identity. She misled her own staff about who he was. Sensitive election system data, including a partially-blurred password, was copied and ended up on a fringe conspiracy website.
A jury of her peers in Mesa County — a conservative county, prosecuted by a Republican district attorney — convicted her on seven counts. The court upheld the underlying convictions. Only the sentence was vacated.
She was properly investigated. She was properly prosecuted and convicted. A prison sentence was appropriate.
The question raised by the commutation is not whether she should have served time. The question is whether the length of her sentence was just.
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3. The Sentence — Exceptionally Long, Politically Driven
In October 2024, District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Tina Peters to nine years in prison. The lead charge — attempting to influence a public servant — is a Class 4 felony in Colorado, with a statutory range of two to six years per count. By running counts consecutively rather than concurrently, Judge Barrett produced a sentence longer than the typical sentence for comparable nonviolent first-time offenses. Defendants convicted of similar Class 4 felonies frequently receive probation, community corrections, or short prison terms.
At sentencing, Judge Barrett did not confine his remarks to her conduct. He said: "You are no hero, you abused your position, and you're a charlatan who used, and is still using, your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that's been proven to be junk time and time again."
In April of this year, the Colorado Court of Appeals threw out the nine-year sentence. Their finding was specific and serious: Judge Barrett had violated Peters' First Amendment rights by basing part of the sentence on her continued promotion of election fraud claims — that is, on her speech, not on her conduct. The court upheld the underlying convictions. Only the sentence was vacated. Resentencing was already pending when Governor Polis announced the commutation.
This has been almost entirely absent from the public conversation, including statements from our political leaders, about Friday's decision.
The Governor's commutation lands at roughly four and a half years — within the range that a constitutional resentencing of an unconstitutional nine-year sentence might plausibly have produced.
Tina Peters' sentencing appears to have been politically-driven. This is a serious problem for any system that aspires to apply justice evenly. The ruling of the appellate court has merit.
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4. The Questions That Remain
Set aside the commutation. Set aside Tina Peters' particular conduct, which was illegal and properly punished. There are questions about her case that the public conversation has skipped past, and I think they are worth surfacing — not because Peters was right, but because the system's response to the original concerns raised by Peters did not adequately address them.
It is comfortable to describe Tina Peters as a pure ideological actor — someone simply captured by a national conspiracy movement, with no factual basis for any of her concerns. But it does not match the chronology of what happened.
Three things occurred in Mesa County between 2019 and 2021 that, taken together, help explain — though they do not excuse — what came next:
In early 2020, before the 2020 presidential election and before national Stop-the-Steal politics existed, hundreds of legally-cast ballots from the November 2019 election were discovered uncollected in a drop box outside the clerk's office. This was a real ballot-handling failure. It triggered a recall effort against Peters, who had been in office less than a year.
On October 21, 2020, multiple batches of ballots, totaling several thousand, were loaded into Mesa County's adjudication system at a rate faster than any machine could have tabulated them. To a clerk watching her own equipment, that looked alarming. The Mesa County District Attorney's office investigated, and concluded — a full eighteen months later, in May 2022 — that the cause was the county's election manager performing a "nuclear option" reset during troubleshooting. Their findings concluded that there was no criminal intent and that all ballots had been correctly counted. But the official explanation arrived a year after Peters had already acted.
In May 2021, Dominion Voting Systems performed a routine software update — the so-called "trusted build" — on Mesa County's voting equipment. Federal law requires 22 months of preservation of certain election records; Colorado law has comparable requirements. According to Peters' subsequent court filings and her defense team's forensic report, a Dominion employee told her the update would render certain digital records unreadable, and her own IT department refused her request to back up the records before the update. The update proceeded.
In November 2021, six other Colorado elected officials — a state representative, two county clerks, and three county commissioners — filed suit against Secretary of State Griswold in Denver District Court, arguing the trusted build had destroyed records required by federal and state preservation law. The Secretary's office moved to dismiss. The case faded from public attention without a substantive ruling on the merits.
Did the system Peters worked within thoroughly investigate the substance of what she saw?
The Mesa County DA investigated the adjudication anomaly and credibly concluded it was human error. The criminal justice system investigated and prosecuted her conduct. But the broader question — what exactly does the trusted build destroy, and what is and is not protected under federal records-preservation law — appears not to have been answered publicly by any neutral, independent, non-partisan technical authority that a non-expert can read and evaluate. Was Peters in fact unable to get her IT department to preserve records before the update? If so, why? Those questions remain open as well.
That does not mean Peters was right about her broader fraud claims. There was not credible evidence to conclude that the 2020 election — in Colorado, in Mesa County, or nationally — was the result of fraud.
At the same time, the response to her concerns may have been insufficient. Tina Peters did not invent her concerns. She was a first-term clerk who had encountered, in her own county and within an eighteen-month period, three documented anomalies — one of them involving actual missed ballots, another involving a records-destruction process she had no authority to stop and no legitimate channel to publicly question. The far-right movement she was eventually drawn into — a movement I view as deeply problematic in its own right — took those legitimate triggers and built a fraudulent superstructure on top of them.
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A democracy that wants its citizens to trust its elections needs to do more than prosecute the people who break the law. It also needs to make the affirmative case — on the substance, in public, in language a non-expert can evaluate — that the elections are trustworthy.
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That work was not done in Colorado in 2021. It has not been done since. I think it should be.
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5. A Final Word
I do not expect Tina Peters to become a sympathetic figure. Her conduct was illegal. There was not credible evidence to support her broader claims about the 2020 election.
I write to say four things.
One. Governor Polis took a hard, unpopular, defensible action against the unified opposition of his own party. That kind of executive independence is rare, and worth supporting when it is exercised on the merits. I respect him for this.
Two. Tina Peters committed a crime. She was properly convicted. A prison sentence was appropriate. The commutation does not change any of that.
Three. The length of her original sentence was not just. The law was not applied evenly — the sentence appears to have been driven by the judge's political views, not by the conduct on which Peters was convicted. The Colorado Court of Appeals said so before the Governor acted. The Governor's commutation gave that finding effect within the range a constitutional resentencing would plausibly have produced.
Four. The State of Colorado has not provided a timely, thorough, transparent, and technically credible response to the underlying election-security questions Peters' case raised. What actually drove her to act, and what was — and was not — investigated on the merits, remain open questions. That gap raises legitimate concerns about even-handedness, and undermines the case that the law is applied equally to everyone.
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One more thought. The political expressions commonly invoked in today's politics — "protecting our democracy," "defending the right to vote," "ensuring election integrity" — set a standard. Anyone using those words should be willing to thoroughly investigate claims that challenge that integrity, wherever those claims originate. In this case, those with the opportunity and authority to investigate appear not to have followed through, for reasons that could be viewed as politically motivated.
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