Colorado Gov. Polis Commutes Remainder of Tina Peters’ Sentence for Election Equipment Tampering Convictions

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced on May 15, 2026 that he is commuting the prison sentence of former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters. ” The move comes one month after a state appeals court found Peters’ lengthy sentence improper and directed she be resentenced.

In their April 2 ruling, a panel of Colorado Court of Appeals judges determined the judge who sentenced Peters put too much weight on her beliefs about the election being stolen, violating her First Amendment rights. “Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud,” the appeals court stated.

” It directed the trial judge, Matthew Branch, to resentence her without consideration of her comments on the 2020 election.

Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison after her conviction on four felony and three misdemeanor charges in August 2024. She used another person’s security badge to allow someone associated with MyPillow founder Mike Lindell access to county election equipment involving Dominion Voting Systems.

The county’s machines had to be replaced after data, including passwords for the machines, was posted online.

County officials said Peters’ fraud claims led to a slew of death threats against election workers. At her sentencing in 2024, District Attorney Daniel Rubinstein asked the judge to impose the maximum sentence. Despite Peters’ claims of widespread fraud, she never identified a single bogus vote, Rubinstein stated.

Peters maintained she had done nothing wrong. “It is with a heavy heart that I hear the vile accusations and anger levied against me for what I did to protect the people of Mesa County,” she told the judge at her sentencing. President Donald Trump has posted “Free Tina Peters” numerous times on his social media site.

President Donald Trump blasted Polis as a “sleazebag” who should “rot in hell” for not using his power as governor to free Tina Peters. In January, term-limited Gov. Jared Polis said he thought Peters’ sentence was “harsh” but that he wouldn’t let his clemency decisions be driven by presidential directives.

“You look at every case on clemency on the merits,” he told CBS News. In a March post on X, Polis indicated he was considering cutting Peters’ sentence short in light of a much shorter sentence that had been handed down on a similar charge against a Democratic politician. “Justice in Colorado and America needs to be applied evenly,” he wrote.

@NBCNews reported the details of the commutation, the appeals court findings and the underlying conviction. The term-limited governor’s decision ends Peters’ nine-year term more than two years after she began serving it.