Tina Peters, the former Mesa County election clerk convicted of seven felonies related to the theft of voting machine software, said Tuesday through her attorney that she won’t accept a formal position overseeing elections in Shasta County, Calif.

Last month, Shasta County registrar of voters Clint Curtis said he intended to hire Peters as assistant registrar to help with the 2026 elections, just months after her prison sentence was cut short by a commutation from Democratic Gov. Jared Polis.

Later, in an interview with CyberScoop, Curtis said he intended to hire Peters as an outside consultant without access to sensitive county election systems. He also said Peters hadn’t yet accepted the position.

At the time, Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, pointed CyberScoop to a statement indicating Peters’ interest in helping the county. On Tuesday, he sent a new statement from Peters that backed away from a formal job role.

“Let me be clear: I have not accepted any position with the Shasta County Elections Office,” the statement said. “There have been discussions about ways I might assist with election integrity and ballot-authenticity efforts, but no formal role has been accepted.”

Peters went on to say her concerns extended beyond Shasta County, to “all 3,114” counties in America and “whether every citizen can trust that our elections are free, fair and transparent.”

The prospective hiring of Peters sparked a backlash, including from Shasta County’s Board of Supervisors, which had just formally censured Curtis for allegedly abusive verbal behavior toward staff, and from Democratic politicians statewide.  Secretary of State Shirley Weber’s office told CyberScoop it was monitoring the county’s  elections for compliance with state and federal laws.

Peters blamed the media for portraying her as a threat to elections, saying she remains “committed to lawful, transparent election integrity efforts that protect the vote of every American citizen.”

“The media continues to mischaracterize my case with words like ‘breaching,’ ‘tampering,’ and similar claims,” Peters said. “My charges were not for changing votes, altering election results, or manipulating any election outcome. Those words are used to create a false impression and distract from the real issue: whether the American people have transparent, verifiable elections they can trust.”

Peters broke into Mesa County’s election office to prove voting machines had shifted votes to Democrat Joe Biden, but  data instead confirmed the county’s 2020 vote totals were accurate. Before her release, Peters at one point expressed written regret to the state for her crimes.

Despite that, on Tuesday Peters again endorsed the idea that all electronic voting machines are untrustworthy, and any elections using them as inherently suspect.

Experts have long said that vulnerabilities exist in U.S. voting machines, but certain longstanding practices, like backup paper ballots, post-election, risk-limiting audits, and relying on decentralized equipment and vendors can also manage risks and catch anomalies. According to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, nearly 98% of Americans vote on electronic voting machines with paper backups.

Despite a years-long effort and dozens of court challenges, neither Peters nor other Trump allies have ever provided credible proof that manipulation of U.S. voting machines, voter fraud or other problems impacted the 2020 presidential election.

The post Tina Peters, through attorney, backs off formal role in Shasta County elections appeared first on CyberScoop.

State and local officials and election security experts largely panned a Thursday night primetime speech by President Donald Trump, saying it was reflective of White House “desperation” to find any credible evidence to support their claims that U.S. elections have been rigged against the two-term president.

While the White House teased explosive new claims about the potential compromise of U.S. elections by China, Trump’s speech was a rehash of claims that both have no supporting evidence and have been repeatedly debunked when investigated. 

David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former voting and civil rights attorney at the Department of Justice, said none of Trump’s claims or allegations were new or substantively different from previous theories he’s been espousing over the past six years.

“The White House promised a bombshell and they delivered a dud,” Becker said on a call with reporters Friday. “There was nothing that even calls into question past elections — certainly not the 2020 election.”

The administration declassified a huge tranche of documents from the intelligence agencies, and news outlets continue to sift through them, but thus far nothing has been found that remotely validates the administration’s claims about foreign interference from China costing Trump the 2020 election.

In fact, some of the most relevant documents found at this point have supported the opposite conclusion, with agencies assessing that while China engaged in influence campaigns around the election, it was not attempting to outright interfere with U.S. election infrastructure, hack voting machines or manipulate ballots.

John Solomon, a former journalist and opinion writer at The Hill brought in by the White House to lead the investigation, also told reporters Thursday that his search hasn’t turned up evidence that the 2020, 2022 or 2024 elections were affected by fraud.

The one new major claim by Trump — that the Department of Homeland Security determined hundreds of thousands of noncitizens were registered to vote across four states — is almost certainly false or overinflated, given that it contradicts post-election state audits that have routinely found single or double-digit numbers of noncitizens registered to vote within a single state across multiple elections.

Over the past six years, similar claims by GOP secretaries of state and political activists purporting to find mass numbers of noncitizens registered to vote have turned out to be grossly inflated due to shoddy data analysis, and the vast majority of cases involving “suspected noncitizens” turn out to be U.S. citizens who are legally registered to vote.

The White House has provided little to no information on the methodology used to flag and identify supposed noncitizen voters, other than alluding to the use of “commercial data” and federal databases. A federal court recently ordered DHS to dismantle the SAVE database, its primary database for verifying the citizenship status of U.S. voters, because it was unreliable and violated longstanding privacy laws. 

 Apart from DHS admitting its own data on citizenship is incomplete, Becker said using a list that relies on matching voter files with commercial data is not a reliable way of determining citizenship.

“It is impossible to take a public voter file with very little information that is uniquely identified, like a driver’s license number, and compare it to a commercial database and say for sure the Maria Rodriguez or the John Lee or the Shawn O’Hara you have on that is the same person,” he said.

Election officials also responded forcefully. Nevada Democratic Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar said that Trump has spent a decade attempting to manufacture a crisis around voter fraud and the president’s speech Thursday night was an extension of that effort. 

“As Nevada’s chief elections officer, it’s my job to call balls and strikes — so when the President lies, I am obligated to call him out,” Aguilar said in a statement. “The facts have not changed: Nevada’s elections are among the safest, most secure and accessible in the nation.”

It’s not just Democrats that have objected to the administration’s efforts. GOP states have gone to court to block the Department of Justice from obtaining their voter data, and Idaho’s Republican secretary of state responded to a DOJ letter threatening prosecution of election officials as “not well met” and potentially illegal under state ethics laws. 

Trump’s speech potentially casts additional light on recent White House decisions, such as firing all three commissioners on the Election Assistance Commission. The agency helps certify voting machines for security, and all three commissioners have served across administrations and maintain close relationships with state and local election officials.  

Pamela Smith, CEO of the nonprofit Verified Voting, said that while the EAC can’t take certain actions that need commissioner approval, “critical functions like voting system testing and certification can continue under the existing framework and should not be affected.”

In 2020, Trump’s initial claims of widespread election fraud were undercut by leaders at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which said there was no evidence the election was compromised. The removal of EAC commissioners could represent an attempt to preempt any efforts to rebut or criticize White House claims that elections and voting machines have been compromised.

Some have worried that Trump could use the speech as a pretext to declare a national emergency or cancel elections.

Tom Lopach, CEO of the Voter Participation Center, said “you don’t dismantle election security infrastructure if you’re serious about protecting elections.”

“You dismantle it if you’re planning to claim, without evidence, that the system failed you,” he said. 

While Becker takes Trump’s broadsides against state election authority seriously, he also said it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that, in his view, the administration is losing the argument across the board.

More than a dozen federal courts have unanimously rejected the federal government’s attempts to forcibly obtain state voter data, while other courts have rejected core pieces of his election-related executive orders. State officials have publicly — and at times, angrily — pushed back on the administration’s demands as blatant federal overreach. 

Becker predicted that such an act would be quickly shot down by courts as well, noting that the U.S. has never canceled or postponed an election in its 250-year history, including when British troops were marauding on American soil during the War of 1812 or even at the height of the Civil War.

It’s important not to conflate the White House’s bluster and intentions with its actual authorities or capability to seize control of U.S. elections.

“This is what panic and desperation look like,” Becker said. “They’ve had 18 months in total control of the federal government and they have found nothing that would support President Trump’s lies about the 2020 election, and so they’re just trying to grab as much garbage as they can and throw it up against the wall, and it’s not sticking.”

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