Two days after the Colorado Democratic Party formally condemned Gov. Jared Polis over his decision last week to shorten Tina Peters’ prison sentence for tampering with election equipment, Peters heaped praise on the term-limited Democrat and slammed his party for what she described as an attempt to bury the truth.

“I feel it is important to speak out against the travesty we are seeing happen in Colorado,” Peters wrote Friday in a lengthy post on X from an account maintained by her supporters.

“The Democrats have once again shown that if you do not stay within their party line, they will try to destroy you,” Peters said before thanking Polis for “being willing to stand up in the middle of this persecution and do what he believed was right.”

Also on Friday, the League of Women Voters of Colorado announced that it will no longer honor Polis with its 2026 Leaders of Democracy Award, as the organization had planned to do at an annual dinner next month in Denver, saying that Polis’ decision to commute Peters’ sentence “(strikes) at the very foundation of what the League stands for.”

“The criminal justice system worked as it was designed to,” said Beth Hendrix, the league’s executive director, in a release. “The commutation — particularly given the sustained political pressure that preceded it — sends a damaging message about accountability for those who would compromise our elections.”

The state Democrats’ central committee voted by an overwhelming margin late Wednesday to censure Polis and bar him from speaking at party events in response to the governor’s grant of clemency to Peters on May 15, which cut her nearly nine-year prison sentence in half and makes her eligible for release from prison on June 1.

According to the censure motion, Polis’ decision “materially harmed the Colorado Democratic Party’s institutional credibility and efforts to defend democratic institutions and election integrity.”

A spokesman for Polis, Eric Maruyama, said in a statement after the Democrats voted that Polis “made this decision based on the facts of the case and what he believed was the right thing to do.

“Sometimes the right thing isn’t the popular thing with everybody. Democracy is strongest when disagreement is met with debate and dialogue, not censorship.” 

Peters, a 70-year-old Grand Junction Republican and the former elected county clerk in Mesa County, was convicted by a jury in 2024 on seven charges, including four felonies, for orchestrating a plan to allow unauthorized access to her county’s election equipment in a failed attempt to find evidence that Colorado’s voting system is rigged.

In his clemency statement, Polis said he agreed with a recent appeals court ruling that found Peters had been handed an “extremely unusual and lengthy” sentence because of her stated beliefs about election integrity.

Peters reiterated her intention to continue promoting her stance in her social media post on Friday.

“I have always said I will never back down, I will never give up, and I will never give in. I will always stand for truth, transparency and fairness in our elections,” she said.

Peters went on to accuse Secretary of State Jena Griswold and Attorney General Phil Weiser of trying to “cover up what was done to the people of Colorado,” referring to two elected Democrats who helped lead the prosecution of Peters, along with Mesa County’s Republican district attorney. Despite that, she added, “I will keep speaking the truth.”

Declaring that Peters had attacked him for “holding her to account for her crimes,” Weiser, who is running for governor, responded in a fundraising email his campaign sent out on Friday afternoon.

“It is obvious that Peters has no remorse for violating our laws and threatening our elections,” Weiser wrote. “Commuting her sentence was a historic mistake, a disservice to those who protect our elections, and an insult to those of us who worked on this criminal prosecution.”

Referring to herself as a “whistleblower,” Peters concluded her post by claiming that the Democratic Party’s unprecedented move to censure Polis “shows just how radical the left has truly become. And if they are this afraid of mercy being shown to one whistleblower, the public should ask what they are still trying to hide.”

Shad Murib, the state Democratic chair, mocked her summation in a statement to Colorado Politics.

“Tina Peters isn’t a whistleblower. She’s a convicted felon,” Murib said in a text message. “The only conspiracy here is the one a jury of her peers found her guilty of participating in.”