Colorado introduces New “Tina Peters Bill” to stop insider threats to election security

Sen. Stephen Fenberg, President of the Colorado Senate, introduced the bill

A new bill introduced in the Colorado Senate March 11 appears to be tailor-made to address the behaviors exhibited by Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters that led to her 10 criminal indictments last week over election tampering, including seven felonies. If she’s convicted, she could go to prison.

House Bill 22-153 (pdf), titled “Internal Election Security Measures,” would shorten the amount of time newly-elected clerks have to get certified to run elections from two years to six months. The required courses include information in voter registration and list maintenance, accessibility, coordinated elections, mail-in ballot and in-person voting processes, voting systems testing, risk-limiting audits, canvassing, and election security.

Peters never got the state-required certification to run elections

Tina Peters never obtained the certification required by the state to run elections, even though she is now in the last year of her four-year term as Clerk. The required curriculum educates clerks in how voting equipment and systems operate.

Pueblo County Clerk Bo Ortiz, President of the Colorado County Clerks Association (CCCA), called SB22-153 “the most important elections-related policy push since voters approved mail-in voting in 2013.” He added,

“Recognizing that low-information election officials make for easier targets for grifters and bad actors, we fully support for them to receive their state election certification before they run a major election.”

In addition, the bill

Tina Peters’ mugshot for her latest arrest on 3/9/2022, charged a mix of felonies and misdemeanors related to election tampering

  • prohibits anyone from serving as a designated election official who has been convicted of an election-related offense or conspiracy to commit sedition, insurrection, treason, or conspiracy to overthrow the government;
  • prohibits people involved with elections from “knowingly or recklessly making, publishing, broadcasting, or circulating any false statement for the purposes of promoting misinformation or disinformation related to the administration of elections;”
  • prohibits any contact with voting equipment or devices, rather than just physical contact;
  • prohibits any elected official or candidate for elective office in a jurisdiction with a population of 100,000 or more accessing, or being present in a room with voting equipment without being accompanied by at least one other person who has authorized access;
  • prohibits the creation of, or disclosure of an image of the hard drive of any voting system or component to anyone without the express written permission of the department;
  • requires all voting equipment be kept in a location that is controlled by use of a key card access system and kept under video security surveillance recording;

    Matt Crane, Executive Director of the CO County Clerks Association (Photo: Election Official Legal Defense Network

  • specifies that “an authorized person who knowingly publishes or causes to be published passwords or other confidential information relating to a voting system will immediately have their authorized access revoked and is guilty of a class 5 felony.”
  • The bill also penalizes anyone who interferes with a person who notifies superiors of any potential violations of election laws, or who tries to obstruct a person from notifying superiors of a potential violation, or who retaliates against a person for providing such notice.

50 of 64 counties support the bill

Pueblo County Clerk Bo Ortiz

Executive Director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, Matt Crane, said the elected clerks from 50 out of Colorado’s 64 counties support the bill.

Secretary of State Jena Griswold said of the bill,

“I don’t think we were thinking about insider threats before Mesa. We have lots of safeguards, but the idea that someone elected to uphold elections would try to destroy from within was shocking to the election community in Colorado.”

In response to the bill’s introduction, Tina Peters told TV station KRDO of Colorado Springs:

This is not “an elections bill, this is an attempt to further limit transparency into Colorado’s election process. Soros operative Gestapo Griswold’s Senate Bill 22-153 is a bald attempt to prevent anyone from knowing how our voting systems work…” —Tina Peters, Mesa County Clerk and Reporter

A week ago, the Colorado Republican Party called on Peters to suspend her campaign for Secretary of State after she was indicted on crimes pertinent to election tampering, criminal impersonation and identity theft.

 

  7 comments for “Colorado introduces New “Tina Peters Bill” to stop insider threats to election security

  1. ***Warning! This comment contains false information***

    True the Vote WI Assembly Hearing:
    An Estimated 138K Ballots Were Trafficked in Wisconsin’s 2020 Election

    Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote presented testimony about their investigation into ballot trafficking in Wisconsin’s 2020 election.

    This “was not the most secure election ever. It was quite possibly one of the least,” Engelbrecht began.

    “We’ve watched the mass mail-out of paper ballots to highly inaccurate voter records,” she continued. “The harried installation of by-mail absentee ballot drop boxes, privately funded by billionaire tech magnates. And the hundreds of legislative changes, lawsuits, consent decrees, all that fundamentally altered election processes. And all of this came together in 2020 under the fog of COVID. It’s hard not to look at the confluence of events and come away with any conclusion other than that it was planned.”

    True the Vote “formed a working hypothesis, in part, from informant testimonies across the country,” Engelbrecht explained. “It went something like this: If non-profit groups, being funded by CTCL and others, were going to exploit weaknesses in our election process, then the exploitation would likely involve mail ballots (which are notoriously insecure) and the newly introduced and highly unregulated absentee ballot drop boxes.”

    It turns out that WEC did not follow through with its stated commitment to CISA’s guidelines for drop box security. Open records requests confirmed that there was no drop box surveillance video available for review in any municipality in Wisconsin except Brown Deer. So True the Vote shifted to commercially available cell phone data.

    The group used cutting edge “geo-fence” technology able to track cell phones within “a few inches.” To put the sophistication of the technology into perspective, Phillips quoted Georgetown law professor Paul Ohm, who said, “DNA is the only thing harder to anonymize than precise geolocation data.”

    True the vote purchased 10 trillion of cell signals in Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Wisconsin, Detroit, Michigan, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

    In Wisconsin, the group looked at 1.1 trillion signals (representing 421K unique devices, 20TB of data) during the period from 10/1 – 11/8, which encompassed several weeks before early voting began on 10/20. This allowed True the Vote to build a pre-election “pattern of life” to help identify the ballot trafficking mules.

    The team then narrowed down the surveillance to individuals that visited at least 5 NGO offices and 26 drop boxes during the early voting period (a pattern that was contrary to their previous daily activity); 138 people in Milwaukee, Racine, and Green Bay fit that profile. These individuals made 3,568 visits to drop boxes during the 2020 election. Philips noted that 14 of these traffickers also participated in one or more of the violent riots in Wisconsin in 2020.

    There are 5 key components to the ballot trafficking hypothesis, Philips summarized: “inaccurate voter rolls, mass mail ballots, NGOs, privately funded drop boxes, and money.”

    “Following the money,” Phillips said True the Vote has uncovered a “nationwide grift around voting” in which not-for-profits orchestrated paid ballot collection, ballot preparation, and harvested ballot delivery operations.

    The group estimates that at least 7% of all mail in ballots (138,000 in Wisconsin, 4.8 million nationwide) were trafficked during the 2020 election. “This was an organized crime that was perpetrated on Americans,” Phillips emphasized.

    During the Q&A session, Phillips mentioned that while they have the names of the 5 NGOs and 138 individuals, they are unable to release that information due to an active legal investigation.

    Engelbrecht concluded by reiterating that ballot boxes, mass mail-in ballots, and in particular “dirty voter rolls are the gateway to fraud” in our elections. They must be eliminated and the penalties for cheating must be severe, she said.

    Watch True the Vote Hearing CannCon Rumble
    Learn more WI Thread

  2. She should have been removed when she was not certified in the specified timeframe. That would have solved the problem, saved her some grief, and saved us some money.

  3. Tina Peters should be either drawn and quartered or burned at the stake for being a heretic of the highest degree. What right do county election officials have to express their opinion. After Griswald presides over the next election she should become our dear leader as governor of Colorado and we will rule for the next 1000 years. In fact after the next election we should declare marshal law and suspend elections. We liberals know we are right and it’s inconvenient to have to deal with opponents. Racists and racists don’t deserve to hold office.

    • You poor thing; you’ve descended into self-parody.

      Trump lost.
      Tina’s on her way to jail.
      Sherronna is, too…provided she can figure out where to show up.

  4. Laughing at and mocking Peters is easy, but at this point, she is ruining her life. As she melts down, it has become obvious she is not capable of managing her affairs and and needs someone to petition the court to appoint a conservator to manage her affairs. Does she have any family or close friends that will intervene? She has become a victim of others who use her to further their political beliefs.

  5. “Soros operative Gestapo Griswold’s Senate Bill 22-153 is a bald attempt to prevent anyone from knowing how our voting systems work…” Oy Vey.

    Proving once again that Tina is only slightly smarter and more rational than the blinkered, belligerently ignorant yokels that voted for her.

    Good Jerb, Cletus.

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