A Minnesota woman has been charged with three felonies after allegedly attempting voter fraud by submitting a ballot on behalf of her dead mother, according to officials.
"It was flagged almost immediately," Itasca County Attorney Jake Fauchald told the Associated Press. "We do have ways of catching and flagging these fraudulent ballots and we're going to do something about it so that those ballots don't get through."
A ballot submitted by the woman representing a vote for her recently deceased mother was caught by the Itasca County auditor's office, who cross-referenced the name of the woman's mother with the state's registry of deceased persons, which is updated every month.
The woman, who allegedly admitted to law enforcement that she completed and submitted her mother's ballot after her mother's death, insisted that her mother had been an "ardent" Trump supporter and would have wanted to vote for him if she survived long enough, AP reported.
Fauchald, who added that this is Itasca County's first case involving election fraud during the 2024 election cycle, used this case as an example that pre-existing safeguards against voter fraud actually do work and are capable of filtering out fraudulent votes.
This sentiment was echoed by Itasca County Auditor Austin Rohling, who expressed that this was the first case of someone casting a fraudulent ballot on behalf of a deceased individual he had overseen in his almost two years in office.
"The system's working the way it should," Rohling told AP.
Officials are making these observations about voting safeguards within legislation as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump continues to insist that the only way he could lose the 2024 presidential election is if voter fraud unfairly costs him. However, the former president has yet to provide any legitimate evidence of widespread voter fraud that could impact the results of the election.
The woman was charged with one count of illegal voting and two counts of making or signing a false certificate. She is set to appear in court on Dec. 4.
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