It turns out, as expected, that the question of Tina Peters’ guilt was never really a question at all.
Even Peters herself, according to testimony, knew that once her election-security breach was uncovered, that she was, uh, well, totally screwed and likely headed to prison.
It took the Mesa County jury less than five hours to convict Peters, the former county clerk, on seven of 10 charges — including whatever charges would cover a harebrained scheme to allow a former professional surfer, using a fake ID, to gain access to voting machines whose hard drives he would copy and which, ultimately, would be made public.
It was refreshing to see that a jury, presented with the evidence, would come to a clear and unanimous conclusion. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any questions remaining.
You can start with the most obvious one: How could a county clerk and recorder, whose job is to oversee elections, fall so deeply into the rabbit hole of election denial that she would risk everything — her job, her reputation, even her freedom — to try to illegally prove a lie?
You can just blame Peters for her role in the plot and the coverup that followed, which is what the jury did.
You can blame Donald Trump, whose fear of losing is so great that he had to invent a conspiracy to explain away any defeat. And we must include those Republican politicians who knew better but who enabled the Big Lie to grow virtually unchecked to the point that election denial became party dogma.
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You can blame the MyPillow Guy, who spent much of his fortune trying to con the world into thinking that the 2020 election actually was rigged and who, with help from his followers, turned Peters into a convert and an unlikely hero to his unhinged movement.
You can blame the culture of conspiracy that allows Trump, even today, to charge without any evidence that a crowd of 15,000 or so people who greeted Kamala Harris at a Michigan airport didn’t, uh, exist. That, in Trump’s words, Harris had “A.I.’d” a photo, despite the fact that, well, 15,000 actual people were there, including the press, to record the event in real time.
Is it possible for anyone to be so credulous, even someone like Peters who apparently still thinks the 2020 election was rigged, to believe an accusation so utterly bizarre?
The future of the country may rest on the answer to that question.
Because that question leads inevitably to this: Is this a case where past is prologue, meaning we should fully expect another round of craziness following the November presidential election?
I’d like to think the Peters trial — it seems she may well be headed to prison when sentenced in October — was an object lesson and that election deniers, whether out of fear or just plain common sense, would see themselves sufficiently warned.
But I somehow doubt it.
Certainly Trump, who seems deeply shaken by how significantly the race has changed since Harris replaced Joe Biden on the ticket, is working the Big Lie, and so many smaller ones, at every turn.
Voting for Trump now, more than ever, means that you have to accept what has become his campaign philosophy — anything that hurts him or benefits the other side simply can’t be true.
So if NPR counted 162 lies and distortions from his recent news conference, you must either believe Trump — sure, his January 6 rally drew a bigger crowd than Martin Luther King’s March on Washington — or you believe that NPR, and every other fact checker, has conspired to make him look like a liar.
You either believe all the photos from Harris’ airport appearance were faked or you believe Trump has special insights into the power of AI.
You either believe Trump’s rantings are the product of a stable genius, or you believe, as Never-Trumper Rick Wilson put it, that Trump is now auditioning for the lead role in “The Madness of King George.”
When Trump was in Aspen for a fundraiser over the weekend, he posted a social-media rant on mail-in voting in Colorado, blaming it on the “Radical Left Governor” Jared Polis, while also slamming the “Lunatic Left” in Colorado for pursuing the since-overturned Colorado Supreme Court ruling briefly keeping Trump off the ballot for his role in the January 6 insurrection.
Of course, mail-in voting in Colorado started in 2013, long before Polis was governor, and the case to keep Trump off the Colorado ballot was brought by a group of five Republicans. And there is no evidence, anywhere, that mail-in voting is somehow unsafe.
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The Colorado legislature, to its credit, did respond to the Mesa County breach by passing a law making it specifically illegal to photograph voting machines or to allow unauthorized access to them.
But Peters isn’t the only election denier to have gained a position of some power. According to a report in Rolling Stone, at least 70 pro-Trump election deniers are working as county election officials in swing states.
And in several states, most notably in Georgia, they’ve changed the rules to make it easier for local officials to delay, or possibly even reject, election certification. As you might remember, Trump and others have been indicted in Georgia for trying to overturn the election. And there was a major breach in election security there — not unlike the breach in Mesa County — in Cobb County.
If Trump loses again, he’d almost certainly claim he was robbed, and chaos would inevitably follow.
And Tina Peters? You’d like to think she’d be a distant memory by then. But the Big Lie that she still believes, despite everything, isn’t going anywhere.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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