President Trump said he is granting a pardon to Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk who was convicted of allowing unauthorized access to voting machines — even though the pardon power is widely understood to only apply to federal crimes.

“Tina is sitting in a Colorado prison for the ‘crime’ of demanding Honest Elections,” Trump said on Truth Social on Thursday. He said he was granting Peters a pardon for “her attempts to expose voter fraud” in the 2020 presidential election.

President Donald Trump is attempting to claim that he is pardoning Tina Peters, who was sentenced to nine years on state level charges for election tampering.

Peters is serving a nine-year prison sentence in Colorado after being convicted by a state court for tampering with voting machines.

A federal magistrate judge has rejected a bid by a former Colorado county clerk to be released from prison while she appeals her state conviction for orchestrating a data breach scheme driven by false claims about voting machine fraud in the 2020 presidential race.

Trump's pardon is largely symbolic since Peters, who is now in prison, was convicted of state crimes, which are not shielded by presidential pardon powers. “Democrats have been relentless in their targeting of TINA PETERS, a Patriot who simply wanted to make sure that our Elections were Fair and Honest,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The Trump administration wants driver’s license numbers and the last four digits of social security numbers for all of Colorado’s registered voters, and on Thursday, they sued the Colorado Secretary of State to get it.

“The DOJ is trying to collect a lot of data on American voters, and they do not have a legal right to the sensitive information they're asking for, and we don't trust what they're trying to do with it,” said Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold in an interview with CPR News.

The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold after she refused to provide the agency with voter information. Last week, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division asked Griswold’s office to provide unredacted voter data,