Tina Peters, the former clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted Monday of tampering with voting machines under her control in a failed attempt to prove that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against former President Donald Trump.

After nearly five hours of deliberations, a jury in Grand Junction found Peters guilty of seven criminal charges connected to her efforts to breach a machine manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems. The jury determined that Peters had helped an outsider gain unauthorized access to the machine in May 2021 and obtain information that was later made public at a conspiratorial event held to undermine trust in Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden.

Peters is set to be sentenced Oct. 3 and could face multiple years in prison.

The conviction of Peters, who has become a celebrity in the world of those who have denied that Trump lost the last presidential election, is the first time that prosecutors have managed to hold a local election official accountable for a security breach of a voting machine used in 2020. It also suggests the extent to which allies of Trump, including those in public office, went to discredit his loss.

After 2020, pro-Trump activists in cities across the country sought to gain access to Dominion voting machines, hoping to prove that they had been used to flip votes away from Trump to Biden. All of those efforts failed, and local officials have in many cases opened investigations.

More recently, concerns have been raised that officials loyal to Trump could seek to tamper with the results of the 2024 election. Other allies of the former president have sought to give local election officials discretionary power over the certification of elections, raising fears that partisan officials could short-circuit the certification process.

Almost from the start, the tale of Peters, 68, read like a political thriller, with allegations that she had secretly hatched plans to employ computer hackers to obtain data from voting machines, and had used disguises and false identities in an effort that allowed election deniers to infiltrate the office in Mesa County that was responsible for tallying official vote counts.

In May 2021, acting on the belief that the election six months earlier had been rigged by corrupted Dominion machines, Peters invited Conan Hayes, a former pro surfer turned technology wizard, to what was essentially a routine software update of her county’s election systems.

Testimony at the trial showed that Peters had identified Hayes as an employee of the county who was using the name of a technology expert, Gerald Wood, whom she had recently hired. Once Hayes gained access to the voting machine, he was able to capture county passwords and sensitive data about Dominion’s proprietary software that showed up three months later at an event questioning the results of the election hosted by Mike Lindell, the founder of the bedding company MyPillow who is a prolific purveyor of election lies.

Lindell is part of a small but fervent network of activists who have pushed the narrative that Dominion machines were used to rig the election against Trump. Over the years, that network has included pro-Trump lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, and wealthy businesspeople like Patrick Byrne, who once ran the online retailer Overstock.com.

Dominion has aggressively defended itself in court, winning a widely publicized $787.5 million settlement from Fox News last year, after the network repeatedly promoted lies that the company’s machines had been used to flip votes away from Trump in an effort to help Biden win the White House. Dominion also has pending defamation cases against Giuliani, Powell, Byrne and Lindell.

One of Peters’ chief defense witnesses during the trial, Sherronna Bishop, a far-right activist who has described herself as America’s Mom, said that two women had sought to breach the Dominion machine in an effort to show that its internal programs had been designed to perpetrate election fraud.

On the stand, Bishop admitted that she had helped bring Hayes from California to Grand Junction to make a “forensic image” of the machine’s internal systems. Bishop, who has appeared on podcasts and videos with election deniers like Lindell, also acknowledged that her efforts in Colorado were part of a larger nationwide plan to discredit the validity of digital voting machines.

Throughout the trial, Judge Matthew Barrett sought to focus on the facts of Peters’ behavior and not on conspiracy theories surrounding Dominion.

He appeared to lose patience at one point in a recent order that denied the defense’s request to subpoena Dominion’s top lawyer to testify at the trial.

“The issue herein seems to be a reoccurring theme,” Barrett wrote. “Defendant wanting to make the case about the security of voting machines, purported collusion between Dominion and government authorities, and the like. This court has yet to see an evidentiary basis for the admission of this type of evidence.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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