Colorado Election Deniers Had A Bad GOP Primary Night

A slate of election deniers seems to be headed for defeat in their push for GOP nominations that would allow them to run elections in Colorado. The primary was Tuesday, and results are still coming in, but as of Wednesday morning things look grim for the fringe candidates.

Though their claims may have been popular among the Steve Bannon set, from Colorado’s secretary of state candidates down to county-level contenders, Republicans apparently weren’t willing to give the candidates the power to count votes. 

Tina Peters, the Mesa County clerk now facing multiple felony counts for allegedly violating the security protocols of her own election office — and stealing a local man’s identity to do so — was soundly defeated in her bid for the GOP nomination for Colorado secretary of state. She was bested by a candidate, Pam Anderson, who has called for a return to professionalism in election administration and who accepts that Joe Biden won in 2020. 

But that was just the start. As Bolts Magazine reported Monday, the Bie Lie crowd was represented on several ballots across Colorado.

In El Paso County, Peter Lupia promoted Peters’ false claims about Dominion voting machines producing fraudulent results and claimed the machines “destroy accuracy.” He called for eliminating mail-in voting and ballot drop boxes altogether. 

His competition, County Assessor Steve Schleiker, accepted the 2020 election results and ran on increasing transparency. As of 10 p.m. last night, Schleiker was leading 66.31% to Lupia’s 33.69%, according to unofficial results from the Colorado Secretary of State’s office. 

In Mesa County, one of the candidates running to replace Peters in the clerk’s office also worked under Peters in that office: Julie Fisher, who said in an interview, referring to the 2020 election, “I have seen enough information to question what’s going on.” She accused the federal government of lying when it referred to the 2020 election as, in Fisher’s paraphrase, “the cleanest ever.” 

According to the state’s unofficial results last night, Fisher was trailing behind her GOP competitor Bobbie Gross by nearly 2,000 votes. Gross lost to Peters in a close race four years ago, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel noted, and has said “Colorado is on the leading edge of voting.” While there are sometimes one-off cases of fraud in elections, Gross added, it’s “nothing that would overturn an election.” 

It wasn’t all bad news for the state’s headline election conspiracy theorists, however: Dallas Schroeder, the clerk of Elbert County with connections to several prominent Big Lie figures, was also under scrutiny after he admitted to making copies of his county’s voting machine data and passing them off to two attorneys. Schroeder is leaving that office to run for the county commission. He ran unopposed in the GOP primary for Elbert County’s second district.

And Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), the far-right congresswoman who Peters said “encouraged me to go forward with the imaging” of the county’s election machines — a detail Boebert’s spokesperson denied — won her nomination for re-election by a 30-point margin.

Correction: An earlier version of this article misidentified the charges against Peters as federal rather than state charges. We regret the error.