Tina Peters Sentenced for Tampering with Voting Machines, Only Now Her Lawyers Wish They’d Bought a Low-End Smartphone.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage the world’s worst tech support call. Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters has officially been sentenced to nine years in the big house for her starring role in a data breach conspiracy that made IT security professionals everywhere reach for a bottle of aspirin. The irony? Her entire digital downfall—tracked by a detective using a cell-tower’s worth of data from a $50 burner phone—has now been enshrined as the single best argument for using a flip phone in the history of election conspiracies. While Peters is vowing to appeal via handwritten letters (written in crayon, according to online critics), the internet is eternally grateful that her grand plan to prove the 2020 election was rigged was thwarted by a detective who simply looked at her text message history. In a related story, every cyber-hygiene expert is now selling “Don’t be a Tina” bumper stickers. The real crime here? The GOP losing their go-to election integrity mascot to a prison sentence that’s longer than a blockbuster trilogy.