Michmutters

DENVER — A recount has confirmed that an indicted Colorado county clerk who alleged voting fraud lost the primary election she ran in last month in her attempt to win the post of running the state’s elections, officials announced Thursday.

The results barely changed, with Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters picking up 13 more votes in the recount of the votes cast in the June 28 election to determine the Republican candidate for secretary of state. Peters received about 29% of the vote, Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold said in a statement.

The winner of the GOP primary for the job of overseeing Colorado’s elections, Pam Anderson, received 13 more votes during the recount and finished with 43%. A third candidate, Mike O’Donnell, got 11 more votes.

Peters’ voicemail was full and she did not immediately return a text message or emails seeking comment on the recount results.

She filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Griswold and the state’s county clerks alleging the recount was not conducted according to state law. The lawsuit claims that the accuracy of randomly selected machines used to count ballots should have been verified with a hand count before the recount began.

Griswold’s office said in a statement that the lawsuit was meritless.

“The allegations in the lawsuit are based on debunked conspiracies that have been rejected by judges in previous cases. The recount is over and was conducted under Colorado election law and rule,” the statement said.

Peters faces several felony charges for her alleged role in allowing unauthorized people to break into her county’s election system in search of proof of the conspiracy theories spun by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 election loss.

She has denied she did anything illegal and contains the charges are politically motivated. She has issued reports purporting to show suspicious activity within voting systems, but those have been debunked by various officials and experts.

A judge prohibited Peters from overseeing last year’s and this year’s local elections in Mesa County, a western region of the state that is largely rural and heavily Republican. Trump lost Colorado in 2020 but won the majority of the vote in this county.

Peters’ margin of loss in the GOP secretary of state primary did not require an automatic recount but she raised more than the $256,000 required to pay for one, reportedly mostly from supporters outside the state after making a plea for help on Steve Bannon’s podcast.

During the recount, 37 ballots that had been filled out and returned by voters were discovered in a bin with ballots returned as undeliverable that were being prepared for storage in Elbert County, which is near Denver.

Those ballots were opened and counted for the first time during the recount but did not change the results of any race, the secretary of state’s office said.

A breakdown of county recount results provided by Griswold’s office showed that there were also some small changes in ballot tallies in other counties that changed the vote results.

Three family members killed during a shooting last month at an eastern Iowa state park were shot, stabbed and/or strangled, according to autopsy results released Thursday.

Tyler Schmidt, 42, died from a gunshot wound and “multiple sharp force injuries,” while his wife, 42-year-old Sarah Schmidt, died from multiple sharp force injuries, the Iowa Department of Public Safety said in a news release. Their 6-year-old daughter, Lula Schmidt, died from a gunshot wound and strangulation, officials said.

All three family members’ deaths have been ruled homicides. The Schmidts’ 9-year-old son, who was with his family on the camping trip, survived the attack without physical injuries, but investigators have not said whether he was in the tent when the attack happened.

The department confirmed Thursday that the killer was Anthony Sherwin, 23, of LaVista, Nebraska, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the family was attacked early on the morning of July 22 in their tent at the Maquoketa Caves State Park campground. Sherwin was at the park camping with his parents at the time of the attack, according to police and Sherwin’s mother.

IOWA MAN SENTENCED TO 10 YEARS IN PRISON FOR ROLE IN DEADLY SHOOTING

A photo of Tyler and Sarah Schmidt sits on a podium at the Celebration of Life event for Tyler, Sarah, and Lula Schmidt, held at Overman Park in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The Schmidts were shot and killed at Maquoketa Caves State Park on July 22 .
(Chris Zoeller/The Courier via AP)

Investigators said all evidence collected substances that Sherwin acted alone, but police have not revealed a motive for the killings. Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Department of Public Safety’s division of criminal investigation, said Thursday that investigators “have indications as to what the motive was,” but don’t plan to release that information.

Police who swarmed the park about 180 miles east of Des Moines in the wake of the shooting found Sherwin’s body outside the campground but within a wooded area of ​​the park.

Sherwin’s mother, Cecilia Sherwin, told The Associated Press in the days after the shooting that she and her husband were devastated by attack on the Schmidts and by the loss of their son, whom she described as kind, sensitive, an exceptional student and an aspiring businessman.

Cecilia Sherwin said in an email Sunday to the AP that her family had recently made the decision to become gun owners only after a number of recent crimes and disturbances while camping previously.

“Neither I, my husband, nor Anthony had any experience with handguns before this year,” she said. “We took classes and joined a range. Anthony was very responsible and showed no interest in hurting anyone and never hurt an animal in his life from him.”

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A memorial to celebrate the lives of the Schmidts was held Tuesday in their hometown of Cedar Falls, Iowa, drawing about 200 people.