Tina Peters is standing by her claims about election security despite a criminal conviction tied to efforts to challenge the 2020 Donald Trump election. In a new 60 Minutes interview, correspondent Bill Whitaker pressed the former Colorado county clerk on her actions and the evidence behind her allegations.
Bill Whitaker questions Tina Peters about Colorado voting machines
Whitaker questioned Peters months after Colorado released her from prison in June. A state jury convicted her in August 2024 on seven counts, including four felonies, for her role in a security breach involving voting systems in Mesa County.
Trump gave Peters a lifeline with a presidential pardon in December, but it left her state-level conviction untouched. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis later cut her nine-year prison term in May, after being coerced by the White House. Polis said the original sentence had left him stunned by its severity (via The Daily Beast).
Peters also doubled down on her distrust of voting machines during the interview. Yet when Whitaker challenged her to show proof that paper ballots produced different outcomes from electronic tallies, she sidestepped the question. She turned to her duty to “protect the election records.”
Whitaker noted that judges “dismissed or withdrawn” more than 60 lawsuits challenging the 2020 election. Bipartisan officials investigated and found no fraud capable of altering the outcome. Peters declined to debate the broader findings, claiming that officials wiped those election records from the system.
Tina’s version of events drew pushback from Matt Crane, a Republican who heads the Colorado County Clerks Association. Peters’ team had already secured backup copies of the records required by state law, Crane told 60 Minutes.
The interview then turned to allegations involving disabled security cameras and fabricated credentials allegedly provided to an outsider seeking access to election data. Peters rejected accusations of wrongdoing, saying “It was not against the law.”
Tina Peters also insisted that bad actors could breach voting machines, while labeling her prosecution unjust. When reporters asked about a political comeback, she evaded a direct answer. While doing so, she declared, “I’m willing to do whatever needs to be done to save this country.”
