Just about anyone who pays attention to Colorado politics knows the broad details of Tina Peters’ story. Formerly Mesa County’s Clerk & Recorder, in May 2021 Peters helped election conspiracists copy secure data from her county’s voting machines, data which was later published online by activists with ties to the QAnon conspiracy movement. This week, her trial concluded, with the jury finding Peters guilty on seven of ten counts.
In the wake of Peters’ conviction, the film “Selection Code” is now an oddly compelling historical artifact. Released in late 2022, it attempts to wrangle the story of Tina Peters into a more flattering narrative. It frames itself as Peters’ tell-all, giving her a chance to set the record straight about how she discovered election fraud in Mesa County, and why she thinks her actions were not only justified, but a necessary part of her duties as Clerk.
To say that “Selection Code” has aged like milk would imply that it was not already rancid when it was first released. As one writer at Mother Jones noted in 2022, it asks viewers to take a massive leap of faith to the unfounded claim that elections are being rigged while providing minimal evidence to actually support the claim. It also omits Peters’ connections to high-profile figures in the national election conspiracy movement.
One thing I’ll say to the film’s credit is that it’s a surprisingly brisk watch, at just over 60 minutes – a far cry from the overinflated runtimes of some other conspiracy films I’ve seen. Tina Peters’ website calls the film “The best hour you’ll spend this year.” If you’re the sort of person who spends their free time watching right-wing conspiracy movies, that may well be true.
It seems that some things may have been cut from the final product for unclear reasons. Far-right journalist Lara Logan was prominently featured in promotional materials, but is nowhere to be found in the final film. Similarly, Kristina Karamo – who, at the time, joined Tina Peters on a national slate of conspiracist Secretary of State candidates – is featured on the film’s poster, but only makes a brief appearance in the background of a news clip from 2020.
“Selection Code” effectively tries to be a profile of Peters and a defense of her actions in May 2021. While Peters herself is the prime narrator, much of the film’s runtime consists of her and other activists explaining why they did not trust the results of both the 2020 election and the April 2021 municipal election in Grand Junction, which saw a slate of liberal, Democrat-aligned candidates overtake their Republican counterparts. Their reasoning for this mostly boils down to “I can’t fathom why anyone would vote for a Democrat!”
This is interspersed with relevant news footage, much of which is reacting to the Mesa County security breach and/or referring to Tina Peters as a conspiracy theorist, saying she has promoted unfounded claims about the election, and so on. Also included is footage of Jeff O’Donnell and Walter Daugherity, authors of the debunked Mesa County Reports, discussing the vulnerabilities of computerized voting machines with “Hal,” a talking computer presumably named after the sinister artificial intelligence from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
Many of the issues brought to light in Peters’ trial paint the narrative portrayed by “Selection Code” in a much more clearly negative way. This film is not Peters trying to set the record straight – it’s her, with the help of other election deniers, attempting to bamboozle viewers by omitting key facts and bending the truth.
So-Called Citizen Activists
Early on in the film’s recollection of events, Peters describes how, following the 2020 election, she was contacted by local activists claiming to have discovered oddities in a canvass of voters.
In “Selection Code,” these canvassers are represented by Sherronna Bishop, described as a “Mom, Activist, [and] Makeup Artist.” While that’s technically true, it sells her political career a bit short: the year before, she had a stint as Lauren Boebert’s congressional campaign manager. By the time she had gotten in touch with Peters, she likely already had ties to the movers and shakers of the national election denier movement – evidenced by the fact that she was able to bring roving conspiracist Dr. Doug Frank in for a private meeting with Peters and other Mesa County election officials on April 23, 2021, a month before the security breach.
“I would be glad to help you [find phantom ballots],” Frank said in a secret recording of the meeting played at Peters’ trial. “I’ve been going around the country helping lots of people, and Mike Lindell pays me to do that.”
Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, has used his business success to spend millions trying to find evidence of election fraud, to little avail. He also bankrolled “Selection Code,” having served as the film’s Executive Producer; later, he also funded Peters’ legal defense. Neither Frank nor Lindell are directly mentioned in the film.
Conan Hayes, an integral figure in Peters’ scheme to tamper with Mesa voting machines, is also never named in the film. Peters used an ID badge belonging to Gerald Wood, a local software engineer, to allow Hayes to access the machines and copy data. Whether or not Wood consented to this scheme is disputed; Peters was ultimately found not guilty of the charges related to identity theft. Here’s what Peters says about it in the movie:
“There was a gentleman that stepped up, a member of the community, who passed all the necessary requirements, Gerald [Wood], whose card was used. … But when things got tough, he changed his story.” [CTR emphasis]
While Peters isn’t necessarily lying, her wording lets her gloss over Hayes’ involvement in a pretty egregious way. The fact that a public official brought an outside activist into a secure facility under false pretenses is not particularly flattering for her. Regardless of any legal implications, it’s something that just looks suspicious. (For her part, Peters and her legal counsel have maintained that concealing Hayes’ identity was necessary, claiming that he was a confidential government agent.)
All of this is to say that Peters was not just a local clerk who had some good-faith concerns, as the film presents her. She was one cog in a well-funded national movement attempting to delegitimize U.S. elections in service of the lie that Donald Trump, and Republicans more broadly, had victories stolen from them in 2020 and onward.
“I’m going to Jail”
The other key part of “Selection Code’s” narrative is how Peters repeatedly tries to make it seem like everything she did was above board, and within the bounds of her official duties as Clerk. This idea of Peters as a dutiful public servant has been thoroughly dismantled by Deputy Clerk Belinda Knisley’s testimony.
After finding out that the Mesa County information had been uploaded to the internet, Peters reportedly phoned Knisley, saying, “I’m f–ked.” Over the course of the following weeks, Peters repeatedly said that she was going to jail. That doesn’t sound like someone who was confident what she did was consistent with her duties as a county official.
Knisley also testified that Peters instructed her to purchase multiple disposable phones, so that their messages could not be traced.
Peters has tried to discredit the testimony of Knisley and her other former aides. Last year, the Colorado Times Recorder reported her claim that Mesa District Attorney Dan Rubinstein had orchestrated the murders of those aides’ family members in order to intimidate them into testifying against her. Peters claimed that both deaths occurred through hit-and-runs, which is false. During the trial, one of Peters’ defense attorneys said that a past illness might have caused Knisley to misremember.
Despite the legal turmoil, “Selection Code” concludes by presenting Peters in the light of a martyr, musing that her journey is “nowhere near over … the more I lose, the more I gain.”
At the time, that was true – Peters was a rising star in the national election conspiracy movement. While she had lost her bid to be Colorado’s Republican nominee for Secretary of State a few months before the film was released, she would later throw her hat in to become the next Colorado GOP Chair… before losing that to Dave Williams. She then became another voice in the far-right media ecosystem, gaining a spot on Badlands Media and later Lindell’s FrankSpeech network.
But now, almost two years after “Selection Code” was released, it seems that journey may be coming to an end. She won’t receive her sentence until October, but Peters, who is 68 years old, could face as many as 20 years in prison.
Not helping her case is the fact that Peters seems completely unrepentant. A day after her conviction, she was a guest on longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon’s show “War Room,” refusing to back down on her claims of stolen elections.
“I mean, we’re going to continue to fight this in the law. And in the meantime, until they either kill me or put me in prison. You know, I’m going to keep speaking out about the injustice,” she said.
And when asked how viewers can learn more, Peters continued to promote the massaged version of her narrative put out two years ago.
“You can go to tinapeters.us. That’s the website where people can watch the movie ‘Selection Code,’ of how this all started,” she said.
