Former County Clerk Gets 9 Years in Prison for Tampering With Voting Machines

Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colo., was sentenced on Thursday to nine years in prison after being found guilty in August 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.

At a hearing in Grand Junction, Colo., Judge Matthew D. Barrett scolded Ms. Peters sternly from the bench, telling her he had imposed the severe penalty because she had repeatedly advanced false claims about Mr. Trump’s defeat and in so doing become a celebrity among those who denied that he lost the race.

“But you are no hero, you abused your position and you are a charlatan,” Judge Barrett said, adding, “You cannot help but lie as easy as you breathe.”

The sentence was the first to be handed down against a local election official found liable for security breaches of voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems. After Mr. Trump’s defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr., pro-Trump activists across the country sought to gain access to Dominion machines, hoping to prove they had been used in a plot to flip votes from Mr. Trump to Mr. Biden.

But all of those efforts failed, and local officials in many cases opened investigations like the one into Ms. Peters.

Before Judge Barrett imposed her sentence, Ms. Peters apologized for the seven criminal charges that a jury found her guilty of but also sought to press her case that Dominion’s machines had been used to cheat Mr. Trump out of a victory.

She then went on a muddled tangent about how the district attorney who had filed the charges against her was somehow implicated in a plot to get her ailing husband to divorce her before Judge Barrett, in a burst of annoyance, cut her off.

“I’m