Tina Peters Is Offered the Counting Room

Shasta County Registrar Clint Curtis has announced plans to hire Tina Peters as a deputy in the Northern California election office. Peters, the former Mesa County, Colorado, clerk, was convicted in 2024 on seven counts after allowing an unauthorized person access to election equipment in an attempt to substantiate claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. She received a nine-year sentence, which Colorado Governor Jared Polis later commuted.

Peters has not publicly accepted the offer. Her lawyer, Peter Ticktin, told WIRED that she is considering it. Curtis said Peters would not have access to Shasta County’s voting system, but he did not specify what duties she would perform. That missing job description is not a clerical detail. It is the center of the proposal.

The strongest defense

County officials generally need room to choose their employees, and a conviction need not bar someone from useful work forever. Rehabilitation means little if every institution treats punishment as permanent exile. Curtis could also design a narrow role with no access to equipment, credentials, sensitive records or certification decisions.

Election administration, however, is not generic office work. Its authority depends on controlled access, documented chains of custody and confidence that employees will follow procedures even when those procedures frustrate their political allies. Peters’s conviction arose from violating that boundary. Hiring her back into the field requires more than an assurance that one particular door will remain locked.

From slogan to workflow

The incentive is plain. In a county where voting conspiracies have become part of local politics, Peters brings attention and movement credibility. Conduct that would ordinarily weaken a candidate can become proof that she challenged the right enemies. The conviction changes categories: from warning to résumé line.

That is how denialism can move from campaign speech into office procedure. It need not seize a voting machine. It can shape records requests, staff training, public explanations, vendor relations and which routine discrepancies receive theatrical suspicion. Ambient pressure is enough; employees learn which doubts earn approval and which safeguards make them suspect.

If Peters accepts, the facts to watch are concrete: her written duties, access permissions, supervisory chain and role in communicating election results. If Shasta County leaves those terms vague, the ambiguity will do political work before she performs any official task.