Tina Peters is supposed to spend the next eight years of her life in prison. The former Colorado county clerk was convicted last year of charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for Peters’s release, warning of “harsh measures” if she remains incarcerated. But even a president obsessed with retribution, who granted blanket clemency to people convicted of federal offenses connected to the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, can’t erase Peters’s sentence. Her state-level conviction is beyond the reach of his federal pardon power. And so she sits in a Colorado prison, the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars.

The sprawling campaign to “Free Tina Peters” is testing Colorado’s authority to enforce its own laws without interference from a federal government that wants to undo a conviction handed down by a jury. Trump—aided by the Justice Department, Bureau of Prisons, White House counsel, and MAGA activists—is seeking to unravel her punishment in multiple ways, with the hope that one might work: a transfer into federal custody, a full pardon, or a release before the end of her sentence. (Her attorney and the Trump ally Steve Bannon recently floated on a podcast the idea of having Trump call in the 101st Airborne Division to set her free. The attorney said he’d “love to see that happen.”)

Trump’s embrace of Peters’s cause threatens to erode the public’s trust in the validity of electoral outcomes and independence of state criminal-justice systems, constitutional experts told me. Election officials from around the country who have faced years of violent threats and harassment for defending the 2020 presidential vote—and each election since—told me the clamor around Peters signals to those who may seek to interfere in the 2026 midterm elections that they can flout the law with support from the White House.

Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that he is granting Peters a “full Pardon,” but legal experts said his power doesn’t extend to state charges. The one person who could free Peters—Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat who has issued tepid public statements on the case, seems disinclined to offer Peters, a 70-year-old lung-cancer survivor, any leniency.

“I, like the president, have the values of compassion and mercy, and there’s been times when people are ill and we’ve let them out,” he told me in an interview this month. So far, he said, “the indications I’ve seen are that she’s healthy.” If circumstances change, he added, “I’ve told people publicly, as well as the White House,” that “we would consider doing something.”

In Mesa County, along the state’s snowy western slopes, where Peters once served as the chief election official, most people I spoke with seem to think that she is exactly where she belongs. “There’s not an uprising in Colorado to free Tina Peters,” Scott McInnis, a Republican who served as a congressman and county commissioner, told me.

But far from the state correctional facility where she finds herself, the effort to release Peters continues. Her attorney pursued Trump’s pardon for his client, who once regaled crowds with elaborate election cheating theories. Peters is deteriorating in prison, even struggling to finish her own sentences, according to friends and attorneys who have seen her.

“Where is everybody,” read part of an “UPDATE FROM TINA PETERS: 364 Days of Injustice” posted on X in October. “The President has demanded my release four times … Why is the DOJ defying Trump’s demands? Get off your asses and get me out!”

Before she was celebrated as a martyr to the MAGA cause, Peters, with a white bob and red lipstick, was seen among supporters as a whistleblower who revealed irregularities in her county’s voting systems. Although Trump overwhelmingly won Mesa County in the 2020 election, he lost Colorado and its nine electoral votes.

In 2021, Peters believed she was in a position to help prove his stolen-election claims. Prosecutors said she deceived colleagues to obtain credentials that allowed an unauthorized person to access the county’s election equipment. Last year, a jury found her guilty of seven counts, including attempting to influence a public servant and conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation. Before sentencing her to almost nine years in prison, the judge said he was convinced she would commit her crimes again, if she could.

“You are no hero, you abused your position, and you’re a charlatan who used and is still using your prior position in office to peddle a snake oil that’s been proven to be junk time and time again,” Judge Matthew Barrett told her. Her constant undermining of election systems presented an immeasurable danger to democracy, he said.

Peters’s X account has continued to offer dubious election claims. (No one in her circle would say whether Peters, who is being held at a women’s prison in Pueblo, is actually posting the missives or whether someone else is.) She is appealing her conviction. Her legal team, political allies, and grassroots supporters have also spent much of the past year working to get Trump’s attention.

Shortly before the president’s inauguration, Peters’s X account noted that Polis was the only person who could pardon her, and tagged Trump. Soon after, her case was discussed with Trump as he hosted members of Congress at Mar-a-Lago, a person briefed on the discussion told me. Representative Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican who once represented Mesa County, spoke about the need to keep the U.S. Space Command’s headquarters in Colorado. Someone else brought up Peters’s case, the person said, and the president made clear he didn’t think the state should have put her in prison.

Soon after, amid a years-long battle over the future of the command, which is responsible for military operations in space, Boebert spoke to Polis and said that a Peters pardon could help prevent the president from relocating the headquarters, the person said. Polis told me he talks regularly with Boebert but doesn’t remember “a particular discussion” where Peters “was discussed in the same breath” as the Space Command. (The congresswoman and her team didn’t answer my questions.)

The Justice Department lent its support to a federal habeas corpus petition that Peters brought earlier this year, a move described to me by former federal and state prosecutors as extraordinary. Citing a Trump executive order to address what the president described as the misuse of the government against political foes during the Biden administration, Justice Department lawyers said they were reviewing Peters’s prosecution to determine if it was “oriented more toward inflicting political pain” than pursuing justice. Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat, said in a court filing that DOJ’s intervention in the case was “unprecedented, highly problematic, and a threat to the rule of law.” A federal judge rejected the petition this week, saying that state court proceedings needed to play out. But the judge wrote that Peters raised “important constitutional questions concerning whether the trial court improperly punished her more severely because of her protected First Amendment speech.”

Trump has taken to Truth Social to argue that Peters was wrongly convicted and to threaten unspecified “harsh measures” if she remained incarcerated. He called her an “innocent Political Prisoner” and directed the DOJ to “take all necessary action” to secure her release. “FREE TINA PETERS, NOW!” he wrote in May.

Beyond Peters, Trump had a long list of complaints about Colorado, including efforts to keep him off the 2024 ballot, his subsequent 11-point election loss, and a portrait in the state capitol he denounced as “purposefully distorted” before its removal. In September, Trump announced he was moving the Space Command’s headquarters to Alabama, which the Department of the Air Force years ago identified as its preferred location. The president said Colorado’s “crooked” vote-by-mail system as a “big factor” in his decision. A White House official noted that Trump had chosen to house the headquarters in Alabama during his first term, before Joe Biden relocated it to Colorado. “POTUS was simply restoring his first term decision,” the official wrote in a statement.