Mike Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow, speaks with reporters outside a Washington federal court on Thursday, June 24, 2021. AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
After Mike Lindell's conference, Tina Peters, Mesa County Clerk, spent several weeks hiding.
Her alleged permission to allow an outsider access to her county's voting machines is currently under investigation.
Former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams (a Republican) will oversee the elections.
On Wednesday, a Colorado judge issued an injunction to strip election authority from a Republican official. The consultant was allowed to access voting machines and claimed to have discovered evidence of fraud at the conspiracy theory conference hosted Mike Lindell by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell.
Tina Peters was an avid Trump supporter and was elected Mesa County Clerk in 2018. Her office failed to count over 500 ballots in a local election the year after. This led Jena Griswold (a Democrat) to order Peters' office to complete remedial training.
Peters joined President Joe Biden's campaign to discredit him after the 2020 election. However, Colorado was won by 13.5%. She claimed that evidence from Dominion Voting Systems equipment could be hacked in order to flip votes at Lindell's conference, despite the fact the equipment never was connected to the internet.
However, it was what happened before that conference that led to Peters losing her authority over elections in a case brought to her by the office Colorado's Secretary Of State. According to the Mesa County District Court Judge Valerie J. Robison's ruling, Peters allowed an unauthorized consultant to access county voting machines last March. One of her aides requested that the election department cameras be switched off for two weeks. This was long enough to allow the unauthorized third party to take a "forensic picture" of Dominion's hard drive.
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The aide is now facing criminal charges
Later, a video of election staff and Dominion Voting Systems employees performing a software upgrade in Peters' office was shared on social media. It also included the confidential passwords that allowed access to voting machines. The Mesa County Republican-led Board of Commissioners was elected in August to replace the equipment that had been decertified after the unauthorized access.
Robison stated that Peters and her aide "negligence in their duties, failing to take appropriate precautions to secure confidential information, and committing wrongful acts through being untruthful." After spending weeks hiding in an unidentified location, Peters was finally convicted. She is currently being investigated by the federal and state authorities.
Former Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams will oversee the next election in Mesa County. Williams was appointed by Griswold to be a Republican.
Griswold praised Wednesday’s decision in a statement. He said it would stop peters "further threatening to the integrity of Mesa’s elections."
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