“Nothing shakes us more than that which comes in the power of another … this thing, of which both the variety is great and the apparatus is terrible.” — Seneca

As much as the secular Left abhors humanity past, it sure seem to have studied Seneca when it comes to fomenting fear by way of a “terrible apparatus.”

At a dizzying pace, the new American Left leverages power and coercion to instill compliance through fear.

The full spectrum of tools has been deployed to bend your will. From the workplace, where you may risk employment status if you don’t attend reeducation training, all the way to the national stage. There the Left’s unrelenting gong-banging of “threat to democracy” has green-lit assassination season.

The most particular weapon now being used, however, is lawfare. And their latest victim is former Colorado election official Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years in prison late last week for doing her job.

When Peters became suspicious that the information stored in the voting machines could be altered, she made a copy of the information in the machines before a team of technology officials performed an update on the equipment.

Peters decided to bring an unauthorized expert along in order to inspect the machines and take another snapshot of the data after the Colorado officials left. This action formed the basis for the charges, convictions, and sentencing.

The real message behind this bewildering sentencing, however, is meant for you: Don’t even think about looking inside the engine room of our elections — especially in important counties that can alter the outcome of national elections.

Nothing to See Here

Many red flags were being raised about election machines before 2020, however. Check out these MSM reports: “Expensive, Glitchy Voting Machines Expose 2020 Hacking Risks,” read a November 14, 2019 Bloomberg headline. The story noted that “paper ballots may be safer and cheaper, but local officials swoon at digital equipment.” The New York Times on April 5, 2018 warned: “I Hacked an Election. So Can the Russians.”

Interestingly, on November 4, 2020, the content creators went deathly silent. In fact, from that day to the present, their turrets have been aimed in the opposite direction, spraying .50-caliber headlines at anyone who so much as whispers the word “election machines.”

Before we move on, let’s dispel the notion that election machines are untouchably inerrant. One need only read the report the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency released on June 3, 2022, to see that. While in one breath saying they found “no evidence that these vulnerabilities have been exploited in any elections,” the agency confirmed finding nine major security vulnerabilities specific to hundreds of Dominion machines.

Enter Tina Peters.

She Dared to Document the Steal

As the clerk for Mesa County, Peters was warned about the potential for malfeasance before the election and advised to keep a back-up copy of voting records.

The vote-dumping events that took place late on Election Night in 2020 aroused Peters’s suspicions, so she made a “forensic copy” of the county’s election files before an inspection of the voting machines by Secretary of State Jena Griswold. After Griswold and a group of technicians performed what is called a “trusted build” update, Peters brought in an expert to make another forensic copy.

The indictments against Peters revolve around the access that she gave the forensic experts to inspect the equipment. The charges also claim that she was not forthcoming about the identity of the expert, and lastly that she attempted to influence a public servant.

The judgment is not about her claims that there was malfeasance in the election through the machines. The judgment against Peters is about her actions in determining that, which were deemed to be a breach of the law.

Contrast the nine-year sentence with that given to Hillary Clinton for destroying electronic evidence of wrongdoing while she was serving as head of the U.S. State Department, or for concocting the wild Russia collusion hoax in an attempt to remove a sitting U.S. president.

Or how about in light of the utter lack of punishment for the 13,000 convicted murderers who have entered our nation illegally? Immigrants whom Democrat policy has sentenced to free reign across the country.

Drowning in irony is the fact that Tina Peters was sentenced for facilitating unauthorized access to county voting equipment, which is precisely the crime that she uncovered in the course of doing her job. But that evidence was never examined during her trial.

Going to Prison for Thought Crime

While Peters’s case has not been free of controversy, you can trust the content creators at the Washington Post, NPR, CNN, and the rest of the apparat to make clear the main issue: They want you to think that “election denial” was her crime.

In synchronous unison, headlines pronounced the injunction that questioning elections won by Democrats – especially the 2020 election – will land you in jail:

Americans, you have been warned: There is zero tolerance for whistleblowers when it comes to elections, especially those questioning the shrouded activity around digital equipment used to tally the votes.

Do Peters’s Claims Have Merit?

For many conservatives, the topic of 2020 election malfeasance is kryptonite largely due to the intimidating depth of tech jargon needed to comprehend what happened. So let’s briefly examine Peters’s claims by asking two questions.

Is malfeasance at the voting machine level even possible? The answer is yes, DHS-CISA acknowledge major vulnerabilities exist.

Were all the voting machines that had major vulnerabilities examined by independent experts? No. A group led by billionaire Patrick Byrne (who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020) that included white-hat computer forensic experts tried to investigate the equipment in six key counties that were pivotal to the outcome of the 2020 election.

Interestingly, five of the six counties blocked inspection of their election equipment, and one of them — Arizona’s Maricopa County — only complied with a subpoena for the equipment after erasing the election database.

The only place where Americans were granted an unadulterated pass into the engine room of the machines was the election equipment in Mesa County, Colorado, via Tina Peters. There, according to Byrne, the forensic experts found a “mid-count creation of an election database (unknown to and admitted illegal by county employees) wherein 29,000 ballots were manipulated (and 6,000 irremediably so).”

Is there merit to Peters’s claims? You betcha.

The fact that the American Pravda media is working overtime to propagandize and parade Peters as a villain indicted for “election conspiracies” should feed your suspicions Their bellowing admiration of her nine-year prison sentence is meant to send the ominously conspicuous message: These are not the machines you’re looking for. Move along.

 Joachim Osther is a freelance writer focusing on the intersection of culture and Christianity. He holds a master’s degree in theological studies from Veritas College and Seminary, and two degrees in the life sciences, a field in which he works as a strategist, advisor, and published author. He is also an occasional contributor to RaymondIbrahim.com, chronicling the relevance of historical clashes between militant Islam and the West.