Jared, you freed the clerk.
The clerk who sold the voting machine’s memory.
You took your price. The town took yours.
A million dollars paid away.
The voters’ trust buried in a prison van.
Drink your wine, Jared. The town remembers.
The yard sale of the republic continues; the items are being moved to the curb, and we are being asked to act as if the transaction was a misunderstanding of the terms.
Former Mesa County election clerk Tina Peters was released from a Colorado state prison on Monday after serving nearly two years. She was convicted in 2024 for allowing an unauthorized individual to access Mesa County voting equipment in an attempt to copy a hard drive and demonstrate alleged 2020 election fraud. Last month, Governor Jared Polis approved Peters’ commutation, authorizing her release under ongoing parole. The decision followed sustained public pressure from President Donald Trump, who characterized Peters as a “political prisoner” and a “hostage,” elevating a local criminal case into a national performance. State party leaders censured Polis, a gesture less a rebuke than a change of wallpaper in a burning room. The prosecution cost Mesa County taxpayers over one million dollars. District Attorney Dan Rubinstein, who led the case, said he hates that this defines his town—a town exhausted by being the stage for a national theater of performance-indignation.
I see what you have done, Jared. You took a local breach and you fed it to the machine that demands your sacrifice, and you did not even ask the taxpayers what they wanted.
Your jaw aches at breakfast. The morning news has hollowed something behind your sternum. You taste salt in your coffee that is not from the cup. It does not leave. You cannot wash it out.
Dan Rubinstein stood in his own courtroom and told you he hates that his town is known for this. You hear him because your own throat has closed, and the word “hostage” that you lifted from Washington is sitting in your chest like a stone you cannot digest. You raised your hand to sign the commutation and your hand did not pause. The signature was clean. The town is now the line item. You sit in your warm office and your shoulders ache like the workers who paid your bill. The stone does not move.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that be God’s.” — Mark 12:17 (KJV)
You had Caesar’s hostage, and you gave it back. But the thing that is God’s—the lock on the door, the voter’s hand, the town’s name—you sold that for a headline. The thing that is God’s does not come back. The lock ceased to matter the moment you turned the key.