If you’re looking for a good working definition of having too much money or having too many friends with too much money, this should do as well as any: you’re the person who spent 255,912, $33 for Colorado County Clerks to conduct a recount. of an election you lost by 88,000 votes.
That’s a lot of votes. If I did my math correctly, there has never been a recount in Colorado that changed the outcome of an election won by anything like 88,000 votes. Or even 8,800 votes. Probably even 880 votes.
There’s only one person I know who might be delusional enough to waste a quarter of a million dollars on a mission that won’t end unless her detractors are reassured that she’s completely lost touch with the real world. . And that would, of course, be Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters, who is walking proof of the old adage that there’s a sucker born every minute.
When I last checked on Peters, she was busy having her latest alleged bail violation overturned by a clearly disgruntled judge. Not only is she an election denier, but she also apparently doesn’t believe the bond restrictions apply to her.
I mean, Peters lost by a whopping 15 percentage points to Pam Anderson, the frontrunner in the primary race to be the GOP nominee for Colorado secretary of state. And if they do an extra tally of which candidate has the most work marbles — which many of us would be happy to help pay for — I predict Anderson wins in a landslide.
Let’s face it, Peters barely passed third-placed Mike O’Donnell, with Peters trailing him by less than a percentage point. And to put it best, no one had ever heard of O’Donnell before the race started.
But to give him full credit, I’m sure O’Donnell, who couldn’t decide whether or not he thought the big lie was true, never for a moment thought about asking for a recount. For Peters, it was her second request, but only the first time she found the money. Ron Hanks, yet another election denier, also demanded a recount — he lost 9 percentage points to Joe O’Dea in the GOP US Senate primary — but never found the money. He must have smarter friends.
If you’re going to bet $255,000 that Colorado’s GOP primary election — in which the frontrunner won virtually every race — was rigged, you need to bet it all and bet another quarter mill that the Rockies will win. the World Series this year. At this point, I would give the Rockies a better chance.
And the truth is, of course, if she somehow raised $255,000 or if it was just another big check from her My PIllow Guy buddy, Mike Lindell, she should probably save that money for his defense for future trials. In what may be a Mesa County record, Peters was charged with 10 election-related violations, including seven felonies. Maybe Donald Trump will send Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell to represent Peters pro bono, which as we know is the amount Trump likes to pay his lawyers anyway.
Peters insisted she must have won the race — in an election a judge ruled she was unfit to oversee in Mesa Country — because she won at the state convention, where party lunatics gather. And that she had won straw polls, conducted in places where, yes, party freaks tend to hang out. Shouldn’t someone elected to the position of county clerk understand at least this about how elections work?
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If there’s anything good that could come out of this recount, it would be if more people realized how crazy it is to believe that Peters’ run or, for that matter, Trump’s 2020 presidential run, was rigged.
At this point, there is exactly no evidence for either. At this point, it looks like Trump could face possible election-related indictments from Georgia and possibly the Justice Department. These potential charges would be far more serious than Peters’ apparent clumsiness at Watergate in allowing someone to use a fake ID to help him illegally copy Mesa’s voting system hard drive. But Peters’ problems are serious enough.
She’s lucky she doesn’t have to deal with pre-trial televised hearings like Trump does. And as far as I know, Peters has yet to claim that Italian satellites or Chinese smart thermostats have somehow robbed her of a win.
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But the thing is, I have no doubt that Trump knows he lost the election. There is no doubt that his aides in the White House all told him that he had lost the election and that any idea of election rigging was, in Bill Barr’s famous saying, so, uh, bull.
Unfortunately, Trump and his allies in the right-wing media — especially the right-wing fringe media — have worked very hard to convince millions of Republicans that the big lie is somehow the truth. Peters must be a true believer.
But now even the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, a pair of Rupert Murdoch entries, have abandoned Trump. And it’s been even harder to find a judge, including a few Trump-appointed judges, who believe there’s truth in the lie.
And now Tina Peters will find out how many county clerks — many of whom are Republicans, many of whom are presumably Trump voters — will find foul play.
The machines have already been audited and checked for accuracy. The votes are being recounted as I write.
And this comes from a bookmaker friend of mine: the over/under number of machines that will be found rigged is exactly zero. If Peters is looking to double her bet, I’m sure she can find any number of takers.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He’s covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions, and countless numbing speeches in the snow of New Hampshire and Iowa.
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