“It’s not about Republican and Democrat,” Mesa County, Colorado, Clerk Tina Peters told the audience of election conspirators. “They’re trying to make it look like they’re dividing one party against the other, but that’s not it at all. It is the globalists who have their thumbs on the scales. … So it’s important for us to bring everyone into the fold to let them know what’s going on.
Peters, a Republican, is under federal investigation for election-related charges and is also a candidate for secretary of state. She and other Colorado Republican Party voter fraud conspirators gathered in Colorado Springs on Saturday for a day of celebration of the Big Lie.
Billed as the Colorado Election Integrity 2.0 hearing, the event featured numerous in-person and remote speakers, including Peters, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and members of the U.S. Election Integrity Plan (USEIP) conspiracy group based in Colorado, and its new Lindell-funded national counterpart, Cause of America.
State Representative Ron Hanks (R-Cañon City), candidate for the United States Senate, served as emcee.
All speakers believe some version of the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Trump via a massive conspiracy involving Democrats, China, ‘deep state’ bureaucrats and the Machine Company. Dominion Voting Systems.
The nearly five-hour event took place in Colorado Springs at Fervent Church, a ministry led by Pastor Garrett Graupner, who also leads the “Faith” pillar of FEC United, a far-right conspiratorial group with a militia division . The event was planned for Denver, but moved to Colorado Springs after the Central Christian Church, which originally agreed to host the conspirators, pulled out.
According to Hanks, Central Christian Church cited security concerns for its decision not to hold the event, although on Telegram FEC United executive Joe Oltmann blamed 9News’ press investigation of the church. , calling it “bullying”.
It’s unclear whether the last-minute venue change prevented Trump attorney and former University of Colorado visiting professor John Eastman, author of the infamous “coup memo,” from participating. Neither he nor Arizona State Representative Mick Finchem, both listed as guest speakers, appeared.
Finchem’s absence was also notable as he is part of another group that organized the event, the Conservatives for Election Integrity, a political action committee headed by the Nevada state deputy and candidate SOS, Jim Marchant.
CFEIPAC backs a slate of election-conspiratorial candidates for secretary of state in several states, including Colorado. These SOS “America First” candidates, including Colorado’s relatively unknown Dave Winney, are running on an “election integrity” platform based almost exclusively on the Big Lie conspiracy.
Maurice Emmer, a lay lawyer and conservative gadfly from Aspen, kicked off the morning session. Emmer provided an update on Hanks v. Griswold, a lawsuit filed by Hanks, Douglas County Clerk Merlin Klotz, Elbert County Clerk Dallas Schroeder and a few county commissioners, demanding a medical audit. independent legal of Colorado’s 2020 election results, a la discredited Arizona. “fraud”. (Hanks dropped his name from the lawsuit, though he still supports it.)
The legal filing, which is based on unsubstantiated allegations by USEIP conspiracy theorists, resulted in an SOS countersuit against Registrar Schroeder. In an affidavit he submitted with the lawsuit, Schroeder admitted to making a copy of his county’s election data with the help of USEIP’s Shawn Smith and then giving it to an unnamed attorney.
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who funds campaign conspiracy work by Smith and other Coloradans, was next.
Easily the biggest name of the day, he basically endorsed Tina Peters, first asking rhetorically, “Having Tina Peters run for Secretary of State, how awesome is that?”
He later predicted her victory, saying, “She’ll be the best secretary of state.” He also called her a “prototype of people we should have to run for office.” He also briefly mentioned his decision to hire Smith and other USIEP members, saying “What a perfect fit!”
After Lindell’s enthusiastic if somewhat rambling speech, Tina Peters and USEIP’s Shawn Smith took the stage together.
Peters justified his decision to copy Mesa County’s secure election data, which eventually surfaced on a QAnon-linked conspiracy blog. She also referenced a sealed report on the state of Georgia’s election equipment, implying that it somehow proves Colorado’s election was rigged, despite the fact that the report does not discuss the 2020 results, does not claim that there is evidence of tampering. , and is written by the same expert who debunked the plot that reversed votes in County Antrim, MI, which USEIP conspiracy theorists say has always happened.
Peters and Smith paused to let another Colorado-based conspirator, Draza Smith, present slides of motion graphics — purported graphs of Wisconsin voting records. Saying she is a licensed professional engineer in control systems, Draza Smith said the 2020 election has galvanized her interest in politics.
“I saw what everyone was seeing, with numbers that seemed to flip. And going to bed and things weren’t going the way math should be,” Smith said.
His insistence that the change in vote totals reflected in the batch-counted ballots shows evidence of a ballot count that is not “organic” or “normal” seems to reflect either a fundamental misunderstanding of the how ballots are tabulated at the state and county level, or simply a reluctance to accept the results.
Draza Smith baselessly claims that the vote count proves the election “was not tabulated but calculated”, rigged via “database manipulation and good old ballot stuffing”. It’s a debunked conspiracy theory. His presentation is an impenetrable Gish Galop of numbers and statistics that imply authority simply because of their mathematical appearance.
After lunch, Tina Peters and Shawn Smith returned to the stage to promote more conspiracies, mostly based on the argument that various states’ election machinery could were hacked and then use the results (Trump losing) as proof that it happened.
In addition to his aforementioned “globalist” plot, Peters also addressed his latest obstruction of justice charges, calling his arrest “police brutality in the worst possible way.”
USEIP/Cause of America staffer Shawn Smith began by revisiting his previous comments about Secretary of State Jena Griswold. Last week, at a similar event in Castle Rock, he suggested that Griswold deserved to be hanged if she had committed the voter fraud he insists she is guilty of.
Smith attempted to revise his statement.
“What I said was ‘anyone involved in voter fraud should be hanged, as a result of due process,'” Smith told the crowd.
Technically, in his Castle Rock speech, he started by saying he was for due process. [listen here], then said, “If you are involved in electoral fraud, you deserve to be hanged.” He then accused various outlets of misrepresenting him and said he was filing criminal affidavits against them “all day”.
Smith’s post-lunch slideshow focused on various technical aspects of voting machine software and hardware that he said have vulnerabilities that hackers could exploit, but he offered no evidence that such crime has taken place.
He made an argument that seemed to show he lacked a basic understanding of how elections are counted. He rhetorically wondered why the results of Colorado’s 2020 presidential election were announced almost immediately after the polls closed, while another statewide issue, the ballot initiative on the reintroduction of the wolf, took several days before the result was known.
It’s not complicated. Biden won Colorado by a landslide, and early vote totals, which were not released until the polls closed, reflected that outcome. National media pundits did the math and realized Trump wouldn’t make a difference and called the race for Biden. The wolf question, on the other hand, was very close and so all votes had to be counted before a winner could be declared.
Either Smith doesn’t understand this, in which case he should take the time to learn more about the electoral process, or he does and is deliberately misleading his audience.
The day ended with a Q&A featuring other Republican candidates, including Dave Winney and El Paso County Sheriff’s hopeful Todd Watkins, who pledged if he was elected to investigate allegations of fraud in the El Paso County election, which is currently being led by the GOP clerk. Chuck Broerman.
The video of the presentations, although without the hour-long Q&A session, is available online on the ACCFEI website.
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