The Election Official Who Tried to Prove "Stop the Steal"

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

ClearingTheFog
@clearing_fog
·
Follow
Please take the time to read this and get others to read it.

It’s long but worth it.

It tells an important part of the story, of charlatans who are using “Christian” dominionism as a cover to engage in illegal conspiracies to take over our elections.

newyorker.com
The Election Official Who Tried to Prove “Stop the Steal”
How a group of conspiracy theorists enlisted a county clerk in Colorado to find evidence that the 2020 vote was rigged.
9:57 PM · Sep 7, 2022

No paywall
https://archive.ph/sKF7y

Before Tina Peters campaigned for the office of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder, in 2018, she ran a construction firm with her ex-husband and sold nutritional supplements and wellness products through a multilevel-marketing company. She was best known around the Western Slope of Colorado as the mother of a Navy seal who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan and, in 2017, died in a catastrophic accident when his parachute failed to properly open during an air show over the Hudson River. Her main campaign pledge was to reopen shuttered Motor Vehicle Department offices in the county. Despite having no public-service experience, she beat a fellow-Republican who had worked in the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s office for eleven years.

The 2020 general election in Mesa County, a reliably red district where Donald Trump won sixty-three per cent of the vote, went smoothly, despite the pandemic. Colorado is one of eight states where, in most elections, voters are automatically sent ballots, which they can return by mail or deposit in designated drop-off locations. According to Janet Rowland, who won a seat on the Mesa County Board of Commissioners that year, Peters invited local candidates to a presentation called “The Life of a Ballot,” in which she and her staff explained how Colorado’s vote-by-mail system worked; how the verification of signatures and the rejection of double voting were done; how the county’s scanners and tabulators, which were designed by Dominion Voting Systems, tallied the ballots; and how the Dominion system was air-gapped, with no Internet connectivity, so that the voting tally couldn’t be hacked. A newly elected county commissioner, Cody Davis, suggested that Peters do a recount of the paper ballots, just to “put everyone’s mind at ease.” But Peters said no, Davis recalled. “I think it’s just a few people that are in a frenzy because of what Donald Trump has done,” he remembered Peters saying. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

Peters never questioned the integrity of Mesa County elections until five months after Trump’s defeat. On April 6, 2021, she ran a nonpartisan city-council election in Grand Junction, Mesa County’s largest municipality, a city of sixty-seven thousand tucked behind a curtain of rimrock, near the border with Utah. As the results came in, Peters got “sick to her stomach,” her friend Sherronna Bishop recalled. “None of the four conservative candidates won, which was bizarre.” (A letter to a local newspaper noted a few weeks before the election that only four of the eight candidates showed up to a forum hosted by fifty-one community organizations. Those were the four candidates who won.)

Bishop, a winsome mother of four and the owner of a hair-and-makeup business, identifies as a “constitutional conservative.” In 2019, a year after the election of the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, she began hosting a podcast called “America’s Mom” to promote what she called parental rights. “Basically, Polis was elected, and everything that I love about my state, he destroyed,” she said. “He passed comprehensive sex education” and a school vaccination bill, which Bishop mischaracterized as “mandatory,” and “killed oil and gas. And so I just started speaking out about it.” She also began hosting “concerned citizens’ meetings,” and remembers encouraging one of the attendees, a local restaurant owner named Lauren Boebert, to run for the state senate. Instead, Boebert ran for Congress. Bishop said she served as Boebert’s campaign manager through the primary. (A spokesperson for Boebert told me that Bishop was only “one of many volunteers” from her district.)

*snip*