Colorado Republican county clerk accused of voter fraud loses election

A recount has confirmed that an indicted Colorado county clerk who was accused of voter fraud lost the primary election she ran in last month in her attempt to win the state election, officials said Thursday.

The results were hardly changed, with Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters picking up 13 more votes in the recount of the votes cast on June 28 to determine the Republican candidate for secretary of state. Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement that Peters received about 29% of the vote.

The winner of the GOP primary for the job of overseeing Colorado's elections, Pam Anderson, received 13 more votes during the recount and finished with 43%. A third candidate, Mike O Donnell, received 11 more votes.

Peters voicemail was full and she did not immediately return a text message or email seeking comment on the recount results.

She filed a lawsuit against Griswold and the state s county clerks alleging the recount was not conducted according to state law. The lawsuit claims that the accuracy of randomly selected machines used to count ballots should have been verified with a hand count before the recount began.

Griswold's office said in a statement that the lawsuit was meritless.

The lawsuits are based on debunked conspiracies that have been rejected by judges in previous cases. The statement said the recount was over and conducted under Colorado election law and rule.

Peters faces several felony charges for allowing unauthorized people to break into her county's election system in the hope of proof of the conspiracy theories spun by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 election loss.

She denies that she did anything illegal and contends that the charges are politically motivated. She has issued reports purporting to show suspicious activity within voting systems, but those have been debunked by various officials and experts.

A judge prevented Peters from overseeing last year's and this year's local elections in Mesa County, a western region of the state that is mostly rural and heavily Republican. In 2020, Trump won the majority of the vote in Colorado, but he won the majority of the vote in this county.

Peters' margin of loss in the GOP secretary of state primary did not require an automatic recount but she raised more than the $256,000 required to pay for one, mostly from supporters outside the state who made a plea for help on Steve Bannon's podcast.

During the recount, 37 ballots filled out and returned by voters were found in a bin with ballots returned as undeliverable that were being prepared for storage in Elbert County, near Denver.

The ballots were opened and counted for the first time during the recount, but did not change the results of any race, the secretary of state s office said.

There were also small changes in ballot tallies in other counties that changed the vote results, according to a breakdown of county recount results provided by Griswold s office.