Earlier this month, Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, was sentenced to nine years in prison for her role in allowing Trump allies access to Mesa County’s voting system. Copies of the voting system software were taken and shared with other election deniers, eventually ending up on a screen at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota organized by election denier Mike Lindell. The judge’s admonishment of Peters was breathtaking as he rejected her lies and exposed her cowardly motivations and manipulations.
Colorado prosecutors should be pleased with Peters’ conviction and sentence, but it is a frustrating and disappointing look at the broader responsibility for Trump’s allies’ brazen plan to seize election system software. Peters is just one of many involved in a coordinated, multi-state plot to unlawfully access voting software in support of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 election. An abundance of evidence has been obtained, not through a comprehensive criminal investigation, but through private civil lawsuits and public records requests, showing that the officers involved in the heist of Mesa County’s election system were part of a larger scheme to access voting systems in Georgia, Pennsylvania. and Michigan. Ahead of an election in which these states are likely to once again be decisive in determining which candidate wins the Electoral College vote, more must be done to protect the upcoming elections and hold accountable those who threatened the integrity of the last .
The last time in Georgia, agents hired by Sidney Powell and Trump attorney Jesse Binnall accessed the voting system in a small, rural county in January 2021. They made copies of the software that records and counts votes, then secretly shared them with other election deniers. , including the same person who illegally let Tina Peters into her election office in Colorado. Copies were also sent to Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan (who led the partisan “election audit” in Arizona). A few weeks later, Logan and an employee came to Georgia to conduct “tests” on the voting machines and election server over several days.
At Powell’s direction, copies of the voting software illegally removed from Georgia were placed on a hard drive and sent via FedEx to Stefanie Lambert, co-counsel on Powell’s Kraken lawsuit in Michigan. Public records show that Lambert coordinated extensively with Logan on the unlawful access to voting machines. In March 2021 Lambert wrote to Logan, “We have access to new machines here. Keep that a secret.”
Lambert has also been implicated in multiple voting system security breaches in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, leading the Secretary of State to sue the county and decertify the voting equipment. Prominent election denier Patrick Byrne, known for losing his position as CEO of Overstock due to his affair with a Russian spy, claimed he provided Lambert with $1 million to finance the scheme to prove election fraud. Lambert also represented Byrne in the Dominion Voting Systems defamation case until she was removed by the court for violating the court’s protective order.
Like Peters, Lambert faces criminal charges in her home state of Michigan for allegedly conspiring to illegally access voting machines in several counties there. Her trial was scheduled to begin Monday, but was postponed until after the election. Powell, meanwhile, was charged in Georgia by the Fulton County district attorney for her role in the voting system violations as part of the larger RICO indictment, along with three others, and she pleaded guilty.
But these limited, local prosecutions do not include the many other prosecutions directly involved in this multi-state scheme. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a federal investigation into how this group of election deniers worked together to unlawfully steal and share voting software from multiple states with the common goal of undermining the 2020 election results. More importantly, it appears that no law enforcement agency is considering how these election deniers, most of whom have not yet been charged, could use the illegally obtained voting software to challenge or undermine the 2024 election.
This is especially critical because testimony to the January 6 committee shows that in December 2020, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, and Rudy Giuliani discussed the plot to take away voting software with none other than Donald Trump himself.
We don’t have to guess how the software might be used this election cycle; we already know that. Some of the computer technicians who received copies of the rogue voting system software have written reports and statements that have formed the basis for lawsuits filed by Republicans and election deniers. Defeated Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn her loss through multiple actions, including an appeal to the Supreme Court, citing investigations into illegally obtained voting software. The Republican Party of DeKalb County, in Georgia, recently filed a lawsuit against the state, claiming that the certification of the voting system is unlawful, based on an analysis of the software unlawfully brought into the state. The lawsuit was dismissed, but DeKalb’s Republican Party has appealed, and the lawsuit will likely be cited in any Republican or Trump challenges after the Georgia election. It doesn’t matter that these voting machine “analyses” never proved election fraud: they can still be used for post-election lawsuits.
Seizing proprietary software that records and counts votes is no small feat. In the wrong hands, this poses real and serious risks to the security of our election systems. In early 2021, before any of these breaches were known, Cyber Ninjas attempted to obtain copies of Arizona’s voting system software as part of the “audit.” Arizona vendor Dominion Voting Systems vehemently objected, stating that allowing partisan entities like Cyber Ninjas to have their own voting software would cause “irreparable harm” to the nation’s “election security interests.” Yet Cyber Ninjas and many of its cohorts have copies of that software, and no one is addressing the damage done to our election security.
Since 2022, we at Free Speech for People have been demanding a federal investigation into the voting software program, but there has been no evidence of any action. The DOJ cannot ignore this any longer. It’s time for action.