Why did Governor Polis release election denier Tina Peters?
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 3 June 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: political correspondent Ashley Lopez, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and Colorado Public Radio reporter Bente Birkeland.
This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. |
| 0:08.4 | And I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And Colorado Public Radio's Benta Berklin is here. Hi, Benta. It's always so nice to have you. |
| 0:15.3 | Thanks so much for having me. |
| 0:16.8 | Today on the show, we're talking about the infamous election denier and former Colorado County Clerk Tina Peters, who literally got out of jail this week after Democratic Governor Jared Polis commuted her sentence. |
| 0:28.2 | We're going to dig into all of that. |
| 0:29.7 | But first, Benta, can you please remind us why Peters was in prison in the first place? |
| 0:35.0 | Yes, absolutely. And this has been a really long saga. It started when she was |
| 0:39.4 | just a first-term clerk in western Colorado. She ran elections, but she was listening to people |
| 0:45.1 | in the mega movement who had concerns that the voting machines flipped votes to President Biden in |
| 0:50.8 | the 2020 election. So about six months later, Peters and others came up with this plan to copy Mesa County's |
| 0:58.3 | election equipment hard drives, sneak someone into this software update and the update |
| 1:04.0 | highly secure situation conducted by the company that makes the machines, dimming voting |
| 1:09.2 | systems, and the state. |
| 1:12.3 | So to get her guy in, |
| 1:19.2 | Peters had security credentials made under a false identity. And I'll say that it took years to get through the courts. But Peters was eventually convicted of misdemeanors, felonies, things like |
| 1:25.1 | official misconduct. And she was sentenced in 2024 to nearly nine years in |
| 1:31.8 | prison. Wow. She served, you know, roughly 600 days in prison. You know, she was never intended to |
| 1:37.5 | spend probably the full nine years behind bars. But a lot of people in the state felt like she should have served the full sentence |
| 1:45.8 | or just let the courts decide because the appeals court had ordered her to be resentenced. |
| 1:50.1 | So the governor's commutation negates that. |
| 1:52.9 | Yeah. That is a lot of stuff to imagine someone who works in elections to do. |
| 1:57.8 | I wonder why then did Polis commute her sentence? I mean, was it this |
... |
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