Tina Peters from “Stop the Steal” goes to prison. What about their accomplices?

Earlier this month, Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk, was sentenced to nine years in prison for allowing Trump allies access to Mesa County’s voting system. Copies of the voting system’s software were made and shared with other election deniers, eventually ending up on a screen at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota hosted by election denier extraordinaire Mike Lindell. The judge’s admonition of Peters was breathtaking as he rejected her lies and exposed her cowardly motives and manipulations.

Colorado’s prosecutors should be pleased with Peters’ conviction and sentencing, but it is a fleeting and disappointing look at the broader responsibility for Trump’s allies’ brazen plan to take over voting system software. Peters is just one of many involved in a coordinated, multi-state conspiracy to unlawfully access election software in support of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. There is a wealth of evidence, obtained not through extensive criminal investigations but through private civil litigation and public records requests, that shows that the actors involved in the robbery of the Mesa County election system were part of a larger plan to gain access to Voting systems in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Ahead of an election in which these states will likely once again determine which candidate wins the Electoral College vote, more must be done to protect the upcoming election and hold accountable those who threatened the integrity of the previous election .

The last time in Georgia, in January 2021, employees hired by Sidney Powell and Trump lawyer Jesse Binnall accessed the voting system in a small, rural county. 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 taken from Georgia were stored on a hard drive and sent via FedEx to Stefanie Lambert, Powell’s co-counsel in the Kraken trial in Michigan. Public records show that Lambert coordinated extensively with Logan about the unlawful access to voting machines. In March 2021, Lambert wrote to Logan: “We have access to new machines here. Keep this a secret.”

Lambert is also implicated in multiple security breaches in the voting system in Fulton County, Pennsylvania, which led the secretary of state to sue the county and decertify its voting machines. 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 $1 million to Lambert to help the plan prove election fraud to finance. Lambert also represented Byrne in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit until she was dismissed by the court for violating the court’s protective order.

Like Peters, Lambert is facing charges in her home state of Michigan for allegedly conspiring to illegally access voting machines in several counties there. Their trial was scheduled to begin Monday but was postponed until after the election. Powell, meanwhile, was indicted and pleaded guilty in Georgia by the Fulton County District Attorney for their roles in voting system violations as part of the larger RICO indictment along with three others.

But these limited, local prosecutions do not include the many others directly implicated in this multistate system. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a federal investigation to examine how this cohort of election deniers worked together to unlawfully acquire voting software from multiple states and share it with the common goal of subverting the 2020 election results. More importantly, no law enforcement agency appears to be considering how these election deniers, most of whom have not been charged, might use the illegally obtained voting software to challenge or undermine the 2024 election.

This is particularly critical because testimony presented to the committee on January 6th indicates that Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne and Rudy Giuliani discussed the election software takeover conspiracy with none other than Donald Trump himself in December 2020.

We don’t have to guess how the software might be used in this election cycle – we already know. Several of the computer technicians who received copies of the illegitimate voting system software wrote reports and statements that formed the basis for lawsuits by Republicans and election deniers. Losing Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has filed several lawsuits to recoup her loss, 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 alleging that the certification of the voting system was unlawful based on an analysis of the software that was illegally imported into the state. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the DeKalb GOP has appealed, and the lawsuit is likely to be cited in any post-election Republican or Trump challenges in Georgia. It doesn’t matter that these voting machine “analyses” never proved voter fraud: They could still be used as a weapon in post-election litigation.

Using the proprietary software that records and counts votes is no small feat. In the wrong hands, it poses a real and serious risk to the security of our voting systems. In early 2021, before any of these breaches were disclosed, Cyber ​​Ninjas attempted to obtain copies of Arizona’s voting system software as part of the “audit.” Arizona’s vendor, Dominion Voting Systems, protested vehemently, saying that allowing partisan organizations like Cyber ​​Ninjas to own their proprietary voting software would cause “irreparable harm” to the nation’s election security interests. Yet Cyber ​​Ninjas and many of their associates have copies of this software, and no one is addressing the damage done to our election security.

Since 2022, we at Free Speech for People have been calling for a federal investigation into the voting software scheme, but there is no evidence that action is being taken. The DOJ can no longer ignore this. It’s time for it Action.