The Tina Peters judge and his TDS

A disgraceful ruling

Whistleblower Tina Peters uncovered huge errors in 2020 voting records — errors that a routine Dominion software update would have obscured. Her reward? Nine years in prison.

69-year-old Tina Peters is the former Mesa County (Colorado) Clerk and Recorder. To the surprise of some Mesa residents, a slate of three conservative candidates had been defeated in a local election, despite the county having nearly twice as many Republican as Democrat voters. Peters felt this was suspicious, and warranted investigation. However, there was a problem: The database would soon be erased.

Workers from Dominion would be arriving in May 2021 to perform a computer software upgrade, and Peters had been advised by a Dominion employee that the process would make it impossible to read digital 2020 election records. To avoid this problem, Peters asked her IT department to back up the database. The department declined her request, so she decided to have a copy made before the Dominion software technicians arrived.

The legal problem

In a clandestine operation, Tina Peters gained access to the Mesa election system, and she had the database copied. Ultimately, that copy was analyzed by two computer science experts, who issued an explosive 87-page report.

It is likely that the actions of Peters included technical violations of law. In the words of the Colorado Secretary of State, Peters was “alleged to have used someone else’s security badge to give access to the Mesa County election system to an expert affiliated with MyPillow chief executive Mike Lindell.”

People who break the law often face legal consequences, even if they are whistleblowers with good intentions. However, reasonable prosecutors and judges consider the motivations of whistleblowers, and the public good they produce. Peters gained zero benefit from her efforts, and she provided a tremendous service to every county in the United States that uses the Dominion system. Those counties now understand that a backup copy of the election database must be made before Dominion upgrades its software, to ensure election integrity and to comply with federal election data retention requirements.

Whether or not Peters technically broke the law, the 9-year prison term is outrageous and disgraceful.

Here is what the computer experts learned

The database copy made by Peters was analyzed in great detail by two computer science experts: Jeffrey O’Donnell and Walter Daugherity. They examined Mesa County’s election database prior to and after Dominion’s “Trusted Build” update in May 2021. Subsequently, they issued a report with several alarming findings.

O’Donnell and Daugherity discovered that critical log files had been destroyed during the Dominion update process, and this destruction may have violated federal record retention requirements. Even more disturbing were changes that took place before the Dominion update:

“There was an unauthorized creation of new election databases during early voting in the 2020 General Election on October 21, 2020, followed by the digital reloading of 20,346 ballot records into the new election databases, making the original voter intent recorded from the ballots unknown. In addition, 5,567 ballots in 58 batches did not have their digital records copied to the new database, although the votes from the ballots in those batches were recorded in the Main election database” (report, p. 3).

In other words, after people had been voting for a few days, someone (or something) deleted the election database and installed a “new” database, minus 5,567 ballots. As a result of this activity, none of the original voter intent is known. In total, “over 25% of the County’s ... entire election, cannot be verified and should not have been counted.”

According to the report of these experts, the changes had to occur in one of three ways:

1.    Direct action by Mesa County personnel

2.    By some sort of remote trigger from, perhaps, a local network or the internet

3.    By means of “a software algorithm running inside the DVS [Dominion] computer systems in Mesa County”

Incredibly, this happened again in a small local election held in April 2021. See O’Donnell video @11:50. This is vitally important information, and we know about it for only one reason: Tina Peters made a backup file and had it analyzed.

The disgraceful judge

In the state of Colorado, which seems to downplay the truly violent crimes of “Tren de Aragua,” Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced this 68-year widow and gold star mother to nine (9) years in prison. He explained that nothing less would be appropriate because what she has done is “just as bad, if not worse, than the physical violence that this court sees on an all too regular basis.” Really? I don’t think the Aurora man who was beaten to a pulp last week by a Tren de Aragua gang would agree.

Barrett is just one more judge who can’t see straight because he is blinded by TDS. The signs of that illness are everywhere in his ruling.

Throughout the trial the judge hampered the defense by blocking any discussion of election irregularities. The judge complained that Peters was “getting rides in private jets all over the country,” and was represented by “four attorneys.” What serious judge considers that to be relevant information?

Barrett acknowledged that Tina Peters had no criminal records, and was a gold star mother whose husband had recently died. However, in sentencing Peters those extenuating circumstances were ignored. Instead His Honor fretted that the elderly defendant, who had already lost her job as county clerk and recorder, was a “danger to our community.” Exactly how?

This judge, like so many others afflicted with TDS, is putting an elderly woman in jail to keep her from expressing her view that there were irregularities in the election. It is an attack on her first amendment right to free speech, and he said as much.

As he sentenced Tina Peters, Barrett complained that she was still “peddl[ing] a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again.” Obviously, “snake oil” is the judge’s pejorative for claims of 2020 election fraud. However, it was completely inappropriate for the judge to express that opinion, since he prevented Peters from introducing evidence to support her beliefs regarding the matter.

Tina Peters was and is sincerely convinced (correctly, in my view) that there were serious irregularities in the election database of Mesa County. She couldn’t get her IT department to protect the system by copying the election database, so she took action on her own.

What’s more, Peters proved her suspicions. She obtained the essential 87-page report, written and issued by computer experts O’Donnell and Daugherity. That analysis has never been seriously challenged, except with an error-filled, non-technical report from the District Attorney. A detailed critique of the District Attorney’s report was made by O’Donnell and Daugherity, and is found here.

While issuing the 9-year sentence, Judge Barrett called Tina Peters a “charlatan,” but Judge Matthew Barrett is the real charlatan — and a disgrace to the judiciary.