Failed secretary of state candidate Tina Peters has either proven she doesn’t understand Colorado’s election process, or she’s brazenly attempting to deceive the public with her statewide recount stunt.

When Republican Jono Scott lost his race for Aurora City Council Ward III last fall, Ruben Medina bested him by just 128 votes. Some of Scott’s supporters expressed concern at the tight margin. Was it legitimate, or could there have been some funny business?

Though Scott and Arapahoe County GOP Chairwoman Suzanne Staiert accepted the results, they nevertheless requested that County Clerk Joan Lopez and Secretary of State Jena Griswold, both Democrats, choose Scott’s race for the standard post-election Risk Limiting Audit (the RLA audits paper ballots using a statistically significant method of evaluating accuracy).

Scott and Staiert made their reasonable request with a goal to bolster voter confidence given the longstanding concerns about Griswold’s historic staff turnover, unprecedented hyper-partisanship and questionable actions as well as Lopez’s apparent inability to do her job well, fairly and without partisanship.

“Partisans Lopez and Griswold refused to audit a nail-biter (only 128 votes) of significant importance to Arapahoe County’s largest city (Aurora),” I summarized. “Instead, they chose to audit a race (for Littleton School Board) nobody was concerned about where all three winners won decisively.”

The Arapahoe GOP executive committee voted to finance a recount. As the Republican Party’s designee on the Arapahoe Canvass Board, I attended the recount and signed off on the results. Scott observed, too, and concluded the recount reaffirmed the results and the process.

This week, each of Colorado’s 64 county clerk offices have been busy conducting another recount leading up to this Thursday’s deadline. This time, it’s of the race for Colorado Secretary of State in the Republican Primary.

The recount was requested by Peters, the outgoing Mesa County clerk, who has been indicted with seven felonies and barred from overseeing Mesa elections due to an alleged election security breach and identity theft scheme.

Unlike Jono Scott’s 2021 nail-biter (again, 128 votes), Peters lost her race against Republican nominee Pam Anderson by 88,579 votes — a whopping 14.8 percentage points.

Second, unlike Scott’s race, the Republican secretary of state primary was selected for this year’s post-election audit. It passed with flying colors in every county.

Third, Scott never thought the results would change (in fact, the margin was 128 votes before and after the recount). Rather, his goal was legitimately to affirm the results and the process. He felt they succeeded.

Tina Peters, however, clearly has no such sincere objectives. On election night, she refused to concede her double-digit loss to Anderson and immediately spread conspiracy theories to cast doubt on the results. Peters subsequently raised a whopping $230,000 to finance the recount — more than she raised her entire primary campaign.

Peters insisted a hand recount would be necessary. Of course, she undoubtedly did this knowing state election rules say an unnecessary recount must be tabulated the same way the original election. Furthermore, the cost would be significantly more for a statewide hand recount. Personally, I would like to call Peters’ bluff and see counties do a hand recount — but she knew they can’t.

Frankly, it’s a hypocritical thing for Peters: in January 2021, she declined a request by Mesa County Commissioner Cody Davis to do a hand recount of the 2020 presidential election in Mesa, about which Peters is a skeptic. On my KNUS radio show, she couldn’t offer a comprehensible explanation why she didn’t.

The secretary of state’s office properly ordered an electronic recount. On Friday, El Paso County conducted its logic and accuracy test. (As I detailed last October, this pre-election test occurs before every election and affirms “100% accuracy” in tabulating ballots).

Because El Paso County had four races to recount (including three local contests), Clerk Chuck Broerman (a Republican) ran more than 4,000 test ballots. Some 2,200 ballots were flagged for human review in “adjudication.” That afternoon, Peters already decreed El Paso “failed” the test “with over a 50% error rate out of the 4,000+ ballots tested.”

Nonsense. The real reason — as I learned during Jono Scott’s recount — has nothing to do with an “error.”

In a recount, election officials must turn off all the adjudication filters, meaning every possibly-questionable ballot that’s scanned gets flagged for human review by a bipartisan pair of election judges. That includes overvotes (voting for more than one candidate), improper marks and even undervotes (leaving a race blank), which aren’t adjudicated during an election.

According to Peters, because so many of the test ballots required human review due to recount rules, that’s equivalent to an error — and means a hand recount should be triggered.

In reality, this proves the system is performing exactly as designed. In fact, Peters should be praising the test because so many needed to go through manual review for human interpretation!

First, Peters’ race passed the post-election test. Now, it’s about to pass recount muster. This thing is over. The system works.

The Tina Peters charade ends Thursday when the recount is finished. Then, we can return to our regularly-scheduled midterm elections.

Jimmy Sengenberger is host of “The Jimmy Sengenberger Show” Saturdays from 6-9am on News/Talk 710 KNUS. He also hosts “Jimmy at the Crossroads,” a webshow and podcast in partnership with The Washington Examiner.