Colorado Governor Commutes Sentence of Convicted Election Official

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Local election officials are the lifeblood of American democracy. They, and not the president or Congress, are most important for functional elections, and that’s what made Tina Peters’s crimes especially egregious. Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, during the 2020 election. Following the election, she signed documents affirming that all results in her county were in order. Later, however, she became convinced of claims by Donald Trump and others that the election was tainted by fraud. Peters ordered security cameras turned off, then allowed an election-denial activist access to voting data from her county. She lied to staffers, obtaining him a badge under another person’s name. When the data leaked, she falsely claimed ignorance. (The county eventually had to replace all of its voting machines.) In 2024, Peters was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors related to the case, and was sentenced to almost nine years in prison. (She pleaded not guilty.) On Friday, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, announced that he had commuted Peters’s sentence, setting her to be released from prison on June 1. This is a serious mistake. Perhaps Polis succumbed to threats and pressure from Trump to subvert justice, but he insists he did not. Whatever the motivation, clemency for Peters weakens the rule of law, and it will encourage those who wish to undermine elections.