Like a bad penny, former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters has turned up again, this time in a bid to chair the Colorado Republican Party. If the party wants any chance at winning in this state again any time soon, it needs to show her the door.

Peters was highlighted in a recent Associated Press story that looked at a national trend of people who deny the 2020 election results running to lead their state parties. Based on recent elections, this should concern the GOP, especially here in Colorado.

Candidates in the 2022 midterm election who embraced these election conspiracy theories lost across the board in states that don’t already lean heavily Republican. It played out even worse for these candidates in Colorado. The most vocal 2020 election deniers in this state didn’t even win their Republican primaries.

Peters herself, who ran in the Republican Secretary of State primary, was rejected in favor of a more moderate candidate. Now, having been rejected by her party’s primary voters, she’s gunning for an election in which only the most engaged and dedicated Republicans can vote. For the good of the party, they should tell her the same thing their voters did – go away.

For one thing, she is still awaiting trial on seven felony charges related to her role in allegedly accessing confidential voting machine data while she was clerk. She’s also pushing a brand of conspiracy that is both wrong and electoral poison.

It is now more than clear that the 2020 election was not stolen. The courts threw out all the lawsuits brought in the days after the votes were tallied. There has never been any proof showing wide-spread voter fraud. We’ve even seen text messages from Fox News personalities privately dismissing the election fraud claims as bogus, even while telling their viewers otherwise. Voters have also shown that they don’t buy these claims and are sick of hearing about them.

This is important for Colorado because we need a strong Republican Party as a counterweight to balance out the power and influence of the Democratic Party in Denver. We’ve seen states that are dominated by one party pass ill-conceived legislation because they don’t have anyone pushing back. This happens in both Democratic and Republican controlled states.

We believe the best laws are the ones that involve a give-and-take between both parties. For that to happen, you need to have two strong parties, but Republicans have been having a harder and harder time at the polls. Going further down the election conspiracy rabbit hole isn’t going to reverse that trend.

Instead, the party should get back to the pragmatic, pro-business brand of conservatism that can still win in this state. We’ve got a lot of work to do as a state and we need two functional parties to get things done right. Ditching Peters would be a move in the right direction.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Editorial Board

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