Gov. Jared Polis on Friday strongly indicated he is considering clemency for Tina Peters, the former county clerk convicted of a security breach at her election office.

When pressed about the matter, Polis didn’t offer an explicit answer, but he confirmed that he will be reviewing the applications from a batch of prisoners, and Peters is one of them.

“As I’ve said, yeah, I am looking at all clemency applications. I think that her sentence is on the harsh side — you know, non-violent, first offender — but I have many that we’re looking at,” he said.

He didn’t directly answer when asked if he had heard from President Donald Trump, who has been pressing for Peters’ release. Ultimately, Polis said, the decision is up to him as Colorado’s governor.

“People have opinions, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is my opinion as the person who grants it. I mean, there’d been ones I’ve done where people said it was Kim Kardashian trying to tell me something,” he said.

Polis was referring to his 2022 decision to commute the 110-year sentence of a truck driver, whose actions in 2019 led to a fiery 28-car pileup that killed four and injured several others. Kim Kardashian West, the reality TV star and businesswoman, was among those seeking the commutation.

Polis said his office is accepting clemency applications through April for pardons he could take by the end of the year, adding there’s a lot of groundwork involved in reviewing each case.

Last week, Peters seemed poised to walk away from the state’s Court of Appeals with her criminal convictions largely intact, even as a three-judge appellate panel raised concerns about her sentence and one specific conviction.

Peters, a Republican who served one term following her 2018 election, is serving a roughly nine-year prison sentence for a mixture of felony and misdemeanor offenses related to a security breach of her office’s voting equipment. Broadly, jurors found that Peters had used deception to enable unauthorized access to a “trusted build” update of her county’s election software, and that videos and images from the update were later posted online.

During an unusually long oral argument session on Wednesday, an interesting dynamic emerged. While the appellate judges were highly skeptical and even confused about Peters’ broad arguments that she had no criminal liability, their targeted questioning of the prosecution suggested that Peters may ultimately prevail on a handful of issues.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice asserted its interest in Peters’ attempt to be released on bond while her appeal proceeded, an unprecedented and ultimately unsuccessful move.

Then, in late 2025, Trump issued a pardon for Peters’ state convictions. Legal scholars and others described the move as symbolic, as Peters was convicted of state crimes.

Reporters Michael Karlik and Luige del Puerto contributed to this article.