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Ms. Peters, a former county clerk, received a nine-year sentence after being convicted of tampering with voting machines. An appeals court overturned the sentence but did not immediately free her from prison.

April 2, 2026

Tina Peters, wearing a gray check suit and gray turtleneck, is smiling.

Tina Peters, the former clerk in Mesa County, Colo., had been convicted of tampering with voting machines that were under her control.David Zalubowski/Associated Press

A Colorado appeals court on Thursday overturned the prison sentence of Tina Peters, the most prominent election denier still behind bars for crimes stemming from the 2020 election. But the court did not free Ms. Peters from prison, and it upheld her underlying conviction.

In a 3-to-0 ruling, the appeals court panel threw out the nine-year sentence handed down in 2024 to Ms. Peters, the former Mesa County clerk, and ordered that her case be sent back to the trial court in the county for resentencing. The court did not specifically order a shorter sentence. A jury in her conservative Western Colorado hometown had convicted her of tampering with voting machines that were under her control.

President Trump has demanded her release for months in a pressure campaign aimed at Colorado and its Democratic governor, Jared Polis.

The judges found that the trial judge who sentenced Ms. Peters had violated her free-speech rights by criticizing her as a “charlatan” and a snake-oil saleswoman who peddled false claims that the 2020 election had been rigged against Mr. Trump.

“The trial court’s comments about Peters’s belief in the existence of 2020 election fraud went beyond relevant considerations for her sentencing,” the judges wrote. “Her offense was not her belief, however misguided the trial court deemed it to be, in the existence of such election fraud; it was her deceitful actions in her attempt to gather evidence of such fraud.”

But the judges also rejected Mr. Trump’s attempt to issue a presidential pardon for Ms. Peters, noting that “the President’s pardon does not reach Peters’s state offenses.”

“We are unaware of — and can find no historical record of — any instance of a president pardoning someone for a state offense,” the judges wrote.

The ruling on Thursday is likely to intensify the legal battle swirling around Ms. Peters, 70.

With Ms. Peters in prison, the Trump administration has battered Colorado, cutting federal money to the state, moving to close a leading science center and relocating the headquarters of U.S. Space Command. Mr. Polis has suggested he is edging closer to granting clemency to Ms. Peters, a politically perilous decision in a solidly Democratic state.

Mr. Polis applauded the court’s ruling, saying that it ensured “equal justice for all” and that he was glad the judges had rejected Mr. Trump’s pardon of Ms. Peters. He also said Ms. Peters’s nine-year prison sentence had been an “obvious outlier” compared with those charged with similar crimes.

But the governor did not say how the ruling might now affect Ms. Peters’s application for clemency that is sitting on his desk.

Mr. Polis has spent months talking to friends and political allies in private about her case. In public, he has dropped a series of increasingly concrete hints that he might commute her sentence, calling it “harsh” and noting her advanced age. In March, Mr. Polis compared Ms. Peters’s sentence to that of a Democratic former state senator, Sonya Jaquez Lewis, who was convicted of similar charges but given a far lighter sentence.

Peter Ticktin, a lawyer representing Ms. Peters, said they planned to appeal the decision, possibly directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Unfortunately, the Colorado Court of Appeals just kicked the can down the road rather than to do the honest, responsible thing and give her a new trial after her kangaroo trial,” he said. “She remains in prison after 549 days.”

Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado, whose office helped prosecute Ms. Peters, said in a statement that he thought her original sentence was fair. A spokesman said the office had not decided whether to appeal the ruling.

“Whatever happens with her sentence, Tina Peters will always be a convicted felon who violated her duty as Mesa County clerk, put other lives at risk, and threatened our democracy,” said Mr. Weiser, a Democrat who is running for governor.

Jena Griswold, the secretary of state and a Democrat, said that Ms. Peters would “continue to face accountability for coordinating a breach of her own election equipment.” She added that Ms. Peters “should not receive any special treatment as the District Court considers re-sentencing.”

The willingness of Mr. Polis, who will leave office early next year because of term limits, to consider commuting Ms. Peters’s sentence has drawn strident opposition from nearly every elected Democrat in the state, and some moderate Republicans. They have questioned why he would speed up the release of someone who helped fuel false 2020 election claims.

But the Trump administration has offered its own reasons for Mr. Polis to act. The administration has cut off transportation money earmarked for the state; relocated U.S. Space Command to Alabama from Colorado; vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center in Boulder; and rejected disaster relief for rural counties in the state hammered by floods and wildfires.

The first veto of Mr. Trump’s second term killed a pipeline project to provide drinking water to the state’s eastern plains.

The president has not cited Ms. Peters’s case as a reason for any of these actions, but his calls for her release have been angry.

Jack Healy is based in Colorado and covers the west and southwest.

Nick Corasaniti is a Times reporter covering national politics, with a focus on voting and elections.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5853205&forum_id=2Elisa#49792056)