July 21, 2022 01:23 PM UTC

Peters Tries To Sneak Recount, Violating Bond Again

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• by: Colorado Pols

THURSDAY UPDATE: Sure enough, the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reports:

Indicted Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters was to be re-arrested Thursday for allegedly violating the conditions of her bond.

Peters allegedly did that when she included Director of Elections Brandi Bantz in an email she sent in the wee hours of the morning Wednesday to counties across the state in an attempt to get them to conduct a recount of her loss in the June primary race to be the GOP nominee for secretary of state.

A warrant for her immediate arrest was signed late Thursday afternoon.

Looks like Clerk Tina Peters has finally messed with the judicial bull enough to get the proverbial horns. We’ll update as developments warrant.

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As the Grand Junction Sentinel’s Charles Ashby reports–even though last Friday’s deadline for defeated Republican primary candidates Tina Peters and Ron Hanks to pony up $236,000 each for recounts they requested of the races they lost by wide margins came and went, Peters is refusing to take these multiple noes for an answer:

Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is trying to circumvent state election officials by getting individual clerks in “selected” counties to coordinate an already rejected recount of her primary election loss for the GOP nomination for secretary of state, possibly violating the conditions of her bond in the process…

“I am, as a candidate with standing, going forward with that [recount] request in selected counties,” Peters wrote in a 2:45 a.m. email. “If you have not already been notified, and if you are on the list of those counties for a hand count, you will be notified to coordinate the day/time that is mutually agreed upon.”

Dwight Shellman, county regulation and support manager in the Elections Division of the Secretary of State’s Office, sent a response email to all counties telling them that no such recount has been authorized, and they cannot separately arrange or coordinate one.

“There is no statutory authority for Ms. Peters to request a recount of the secretary of state race on the Republican Party ballot ‘in selected counties,'” Shellman wrote. “To be clear, Ms. Peters did not comply with the statutory conditions for a recount of the Republican Party secretary of state race, and there will be no recount of that race in any county.”

In typical Tina Peters form, what she’s proposing has absolutely no basis in Colorado election law. There’s no process for “selected counties,” which we assume to be counties with clerks friendly with Peters, to conduct their own recounts. And according to the Secretary of State’s office as reported in this story, they can’t change the counting method to a hand count unless a problem has been found with the first count–and despite Peters’ and Hanks’ fact-free insistence otherwise, there was no problem with the count in the June 28th primary as post-election audits have already confirmed.

Not to mention that hand counting is demonstrably less reliable. The most likely “error” will be their own.

In short, it’s just another crackpot attempt by Tina Peters to take election law into her own hands in order to prove the result of an election lost by unambiguous margins was somehow incorrect. For Peters, who appears to be immune to humiliation on a professional level, the problem could be that her recount request was sent to an employee at the Mesa County Clerk’s office that Peters is barred from contacting under the terms of the bond agreement in her official misconduct criminal case. As readers know, Peters barely stayed out of jail a week ago after violating that agreement with an unauthorized trip to Las Vegas to speak at a “constitutional sheriff” convention.

At some point, the judge is going to have to put some teeth in those conditions.