The release of the local election official convicted of seven crimes is likely to encourage attacks on election integrity.

Local election officials are the lifeblood of American democracy. They, and not the president or Congress, are most important for functional elections, and that’s what made Tina Peters’s crimes especially egregious.

Peters was the county clerk in Mesa County, Colorado, during the 2020 election. Following the election, she signed documents affirming that all results in her county were in order. Later, however, she became convinced of claims by Donald Trump and others that the election was tainted by fraud. Peters ordered security cameras turned off, then allowed an election-denial activist access to voting data from her county. She lied to staffers, obtaining him a badge under another person’s name. When the data leaked, she falsely claimed ignorance. (The county eventually had to replace all of its voting machines.)

In 2024, Peters was convicted of four felonies and three misdemeanors related to the case, and was sentenced to almost nine years in prison. (She pleaded not guilty.) On Friday, Colorado Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, announced that he had commuted Peters’s sentence, setting her to be released from prison on June 1. This is a serious mistake. Perhaps Polis succumbed to threats and pressure from Trump to subvert justice, but he insists he did not. Whatever the motivation, clemency for Peters weakens the rule of law, and it will encourage those who wish to undermine elections.

Peters became a cause célèbre for Trump and his backers—“the most prominent MAGA prisoner still behind bars,” as my colleague Yvonne Wingett Sanchez wrote last year. Peters was so prominent mainly because she was one of the very few people involved in post-2020 election denial to face a serious consequence. Trump himself had escaped trial or conviction, and he had granted clemency to others, but because Peters was convicted in state court, he couldn’t pardon her.

Instead, Trump spent months lambasting Polis and punishing Colorado, including moving U.S. Space Command to Alabama, killing a water project, and closing down a climate-research center. This is an appalling abuse of federal power: a president, for his own political purposes, attempting to force a sovereign state to release a duly convicted prisoner, using public money. It is very similar, in fact, to how Trump tried to extort Ukraine, leading to his first impeachment.

Polis claims not that he was strong-armed but that he reached the decision of his own avail, which might be even worse. He suggested that Peters was being penalized for casting doubt on the election. “It’s not a crime in our country to believe the earth is flat,” Polis told The New York Times. “It’s not a crime to believe voting machines are flawed.” Just so—but acting on those beliefs can be a crime. Peters didn’t just tell people the election was rigged; she took actions that violated the law based on that mistaken idea.

Fraud and abuse by election officials such as Peters are, ironically, much greater threats to election integrity than the bogus claims that she has backed. Because her position gave her an imprimatur of authority, her claims have also made the work of election officials who are trying to do the right thing much harder. A group representing Colorado county clerks opposed granting Peters clemency, citing violent threats from her supporters. The Republican district attorney who prosecuted Peters told the Times that he opposed the move and urged the governor to speak with the Republican county commissioners who had to clean up her mess.

Polis granted Peters clemency at a time when many prominent Democrats are emphasizing the need for harsher accountability for Trump and people around him. (Polis’s decision drew widespread condemnation from high-ranking Democrats in Colorado and elsewhere.) Clemency and leniency can be virtues, but only when the offender has shown a willingness to change or is part of some disadvantaged group. Peters doesn’t appear especially remorseful. In her clemency application, she said that her actions were “wrong” and added, “Going forward, I will make sure that my actions always follow the law, and I will avoid the mistakes of the past.” This apology didn’t convince the governor’s clemency advisory board, according to the Times, and it doesn’t mesh well with her social-media presence, where she has continued to portray herself as a persecuted whistleblower. Peters also ran for secretary of state in 2022. When she lost the GOP primary, she blamed—you guessed it—fraud.

Instead, clemency seems only to have convinced many 2020 election deniers that they were right all along. I have reported on the pardon-to-prison pipeline for people involved in the January 6 riot who were sprung free by Trump and then committed more crimes, and new examples keep popping up. Election deniers have taken top positions across government, including overseeing election security at the Department of Homeland Security, and some could even be elected as governor this year.

The most glaring example, of course, is the president himself. Trump repeatedly escaped serious consequences: He was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate because Republicans who loathed him were unwilling to cast a tough vote. A state case against him in Georgia fell apart because of misconduct by the Fulton County district attorney. The Justice Department brought charges, but the Supreme Court both bestowed broad immunity on former presidents for official actions and ran out the clock on a chance to bring him to trial.

Emboldened by getting off without serious consequences, Trump has not only abused his power to press for clemency for Peters. He has also picked up right where he left off in 2020, embarking on a broad effort to subvert the 2026 midterms and spreading false claims of fraud.

Two months ago, the political scientist Seth Masket, an expert on national politics at the University of Denver, called Peters’s continued imprisonment “a one-person measure of democratic health,” writing that “if Trump can degrade democracy in a solidly blue state with Democratic trifecta control and one of the best election systems and highest turnout rates in the country, he can do it anywhere.” Polis’s decision on Friday makes the patient much sicker.