Tina Peters, perhaps the most prominent 2020 election denier who remains behind bars, is set to go free after Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado, a Democrat, commuted her sentence on Friday.
The remarkable development cuts short the roughly nine-year sentence that Ms. Peters, a former county clerk in Mesa County, Colo., was given after being convicted in 2024 for her role in a brazen plot to examine voting machines under her control after the 2020 election. Ms. Peters had tried to prove that the machines had been used to rig the contest against President Trump.
In an interview at the Colorado State Capitol, the governor said his commutation was not an attempt to placate Mr. Trump, who has leveled a barrage of funding cuts and policy attacks at Colorado in a hostile effort to free Ms. Peters.
Instead, Mr. Polis said he believed that Ms. Peters, a nonviolent first-time offender, had received too harsh a sentence because of her embrace of conspiracy theories about Mr. Trump’s 2020 election loss.
“She committed a crime; she deserves to be a convicted felon,” said Mr. Polis, noting that he was not pardoning Ms. Peters, who will be released on parole on June 1. But, he added, “she was given an unusually harsh sentence.”
Mr. Polis called Ms. Peters’s beliefs about the 2020 election “dangerously incorrect,” but said they should not have been an element of her original sentencing.
Mr. Polis had previously said he needed to see an expression of remorse from Ms. Peters. On Friday, he said that in her application for a commutation, she had acknowledged that what she did was wrong.
“I made mistakes, and for those I am sorry,” Ms. Peters said in a statement. “Five years ago, I misled the secretary of state when allowing a person to gain access to county voting equipment. That was wrong. I have learned and grown during my time in prison and going forward, I will make sure that my actions always follow the law.”
Her impending freedom is the latest example of the steady erosion of efforts to hold supporters of Mr. Trump accountable for attempts to overturn the 2020 election. On his first day back in the White House last year, he granted clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Investigations into his actions, by both federal investigators and local law enforcement officials in Georgia, quickly collapsed.
But forcing the release of Ms. Peters, who was convicted of a state crime and not a federal one, had proved to be more challenging for Mr. Trump, who issued her a symbolic pardon. Her continued imprisonment undercut the president’s sweeping attempt to rewrite the history of the 2020 election.
Minutes after the clemency was announced, Mr. Trump posted on social media, “FREE TINA!”
The commutation by Mr. Polis was one of the most agonizing decisions about justice and punishment he has faced in his two terms as an against-the-grain Democratic governor. He has previously irked fellow Democrats by supporting the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for health secretary and by vetoing dozens of bills passed by Colorado’s Democrat-controlled legislature.
The question of whether to free Ms. Peters put the governor and the state of Colorado under enormous pressure for months, and thousands of Coloradans have weighed in with the governor’s office on her fate.
Mr. Polis’s decision angered many Democratic allies, as well as some Republicans, who argued that freeing Ms. Peters would undercut the state’s elections and rule of law.
Jena Griswold, the Democratic secretary of state in Colorado, said on Friday that Mr. Polis’s move would “validate and embolden the election denial movement and leave a dark, dangerous imprint on American democracy for years to come.”
Matt Crane, a Republican former election official who is now the executive director of the Colorado Clerks Association, called the decision to free Ms. Peters “shameful.”
“At a time when election officials need strong support, this decision abandons them and supports the attack on the legitimacy of American elections,” he said.
The timing of Mr. Polis’s decision upends several ongoing legal fights over Ms. Peters’s imprisonment.
Last month, a Colorado appeals court overturned her sentence, declaring that the judge in her case had violated her free speech rights by criticizing her belief in the falsehood that the 2020 election had been stolen from Mr. Trump. The judges upheld her underlying conviction, but ordered she be resentenced.
That resentencing has not yet occurred, and lawyers for Ms. Peters are challenging her conviction on other grounds. One lawyer, John Case, indicated on Friday that her team planned to appeal her conviction to the Colorado Supreme Court.
Opponents of the commutation had urged Mr. Polis not to intervene when so much in her case remained unsettled. But Mr. Polis said on Friday that he had decided to wait until the appeals court ruled on Ms. Peters’s case, and fully agreed with its reasoning.
The governor’s decision came after Mr. Trump cut hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money for Colorado, moved to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center in Boulder, rejected disaster relief for rural counties in the state that had been hammered by floods and fire, and vetoed an urgently needed water pipeline for rural Colorado.
In the interview, Mr. Polis pointed out that Mr. Trump had other grievances against Colorado, such as its mail-in voting system, and said he was not making his commutation decision with the expectation that Mr. Trump would undo his actions against Colorado.
“That’s not something I ever considered,” he said.
The commutation capped a tumultuous and bizarre saga that seemed ripped from the pages of a spy novel. False identities, computer hackers and covert meetings played a part as Ms. Peters and other Trump loyalists tried fruitlessly — and, it seemed, illegally — to uncover a grand conspiracy about the 2020 presidential election.
As it quickly became clear that there was no evidence of widespread malfeasance, state prosecutors indicted Ms. Peters for her role in the operation, in which she conspired with an outsider to examine local election machines, copy their hard drives and share the information on the internet. Their goal: Prove that state officials and Dominion Voting Systems, the manufacturer of the machines, had erased a computer trail of vote-switching or other fraud.
No such proof emerged.
State election officials quickly discovered the activity, decommissioned the tainted machines and barred Ms. Peters from overseeing elections. Among other concerns was the possibility that the now-public software data would make the system vulnerable to attacks.
Yet the episode made Ms. Peters a celebrity among far-right election activists and endeared her to Mr. Trump, who viewed her as a political prisoner who had been willing to risk her job to prove his false claims that his 2020 defeat was rigged.
Mr. Polis granted eight other commutations on Friday, reading through the cases one by one. He described convicted murderers who had earned college degrees and become model prisoners, as well as prisoners who had received disproportionately harsh sentences or who had made peace with their victims’ families.
“Each of these are hard decisions,” he said.
The last name on his list was that of Ms. Peters.
