Gov. Jared Polis said attempts to interfere with midterm elections are “dangerous,” but he stopped short of drawing a line to his decision to shorten the sentence of one of the people pushing those efforts.
Asked about reports that former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters had spoken with President Donald Trump regarding a plan to seize ballots after they are counted by voting tabulators, Polis rebuked the White House.
“If there was any discussion of seizing ballot boxes or, even worse, a civil war in the context of our free elections, that’s dangerous and unbefitting the office of the President of the United States. We need to learn to disagree better, and I call on the President and his team to do what they can to tone down the rhetoric, as I always try to do here in our state,” Polis said in a statement Thursday.
Peters met with Trump earlier this week to pitch a plan related to the midterm elections, according to Ed Martin, a former pardon attorney for the Department of Justice under Trump, who appeared on the streaming channel Real America’s Voice.
“Tina Peters from Colorado was in the Oval Office meeting with the president on election integrity, and they were talking about the plans,” Martin said on “Bolling!” the Real America’s Voice program, which is now sponsored by the prediction market Kalshi.
According to Peters’ attorney, Peter Ticktin, those plans involve seizing ballots after they are counted in order to do a second count to check the veracity of the midterm outcomes.
“Her idea is, get control over the ballots as soon as the machine spits them through and then do a recount because that would eliminate whatever effect the machines have,” Ticktin told Colorado political activist and podcaster Joe Oltmann. “And I think we're going to be in a position where that could be done.”
Ticktin said that plan would not involve an emergency order to stop elections ahead of time. A spokesperson for Ticktin said he was limited in what he could discuss about Peters, given his role as her attorney.
Ticktin served as one of Peters’ attorneys during her criminal trial. In 2024, Peters was convicted of a suite of charges for allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment while serving as Mesa County Clerk. Peters said she was attempting to prove fraud in American elections. No evidence of such malfeasance ever surfaced either at trial or through investigation by local law enforcement.
She was freed when Polis commuted her sentence this summer amid considerable pushback from Democrats concerned that Peters had not shown remorse for her crimes and would continue to push unfounded election conspiracies.
Polis’ statement did not address his decision to shorten Peters’ sentence, nor did it reference the former clerk. The governor has spoken at length about his decision to commute the nearly-9-year prison sentence, pointing to concerns over Peters’ age and her free speech rights. The governor even authored a newsletter addressing the issue in May. At the time, he said he would write a follow-up post. That post has not yet been published.
Instead, Polis focused his comments on Colorado’s election security.
“Colorado has nation-leading, gold-standard, secure elections. Coloradans from every part of the political spectrum securely and conveniently vote in each election, making our voices heard and exercising our constitutional right. In Colorado, we will protect the right to vote, and attempts to undermine election integrity, fear-monger, and make it harder for Coloradans to exercise our right to vote from anyone are irresponsible and not acceptable,” Polis said. “These suggestions are an absurd and desperate attempt to distract from the fact that this year's midterms will be a devastating reflection on skyrocketing costs under the leadership of Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress.”
Speaking on the podcast to Oltmann, Ticktin accused Democrats of pushing a strategy to remove Trump and Vice President JD Vance at the same time.
“I don't believe it's going to happen. I believe we may end up with that scenario at the end of the election. Look, one of two things are really going to happen. Either the election is going to give a fair result or it's not,” Ticktin said, adding that if elections were legitimate, then Republicans had better vote or they were “giving it away stupidly on the basis of theories.”
During the conversation with Oltmann, Ticktin dismissed the notion that he had called for martial law to operate the elections. Rather, he said, if ‘the vote is crazy,’ then “we have to have the only man in the world that has previously had an experience like what’s coming to be called on next,” seemingly alluding to Jan. 6.
“It’s better, if we're going to have a civil war of any sort, that it be martial law with our side in control of the armaments and government. So that's where we're going to be if that happens,” Ticktin said.
Matt Crane, head of the Colorado County Clerks Association, said “we've heard talk of civil war coming from some of the election denier community for the last five or six years. So this is not new.” Crane added that Peters has not demonstrated any qualifications to offer input on elections.
“She is not a viable election consultant. She doesn't know much about elections at all, which is why she was duped into the election security breach that she led and spent time in jail. So the election community, not just here in Colorado, but across the country, is laughing at the fact that these people are relying on Tina Peters as some kind of election expert,” Crane said.
CPR’s Anthony Cotton and Ryan Warner contributed to this story.