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American view: Minnesota voting system proves accurate once again – Grand Forks Herald
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American view: Minnesota voting system proves accurate once again – Grand Forks Herald

A northern Minnesota woman tried to vote for her deceased mother and was caught by local authorities, who charged her with felonies. This is another example of Minnesota’s voting system not only being foolproof but also imposing penalties on those who cheat.

Itasca County authorities charged the woman after she told a sheriff’s lieutenant that she filled out a ballot in her mother’s name after she died. The woman was an “ardent” supporter of former President Donald Trump and wanted to vote for him before he died. The woman’s daughter was accused of voting illegally and presenting false documents to prepare the ballot, forging her mother’s signature and leaving the ballot paper.

The county was alerted to fraudulent voting after comparing the name to a state list of recently deceased people. The ballot was delivered in October, when the woman died in August.

The lawsuit came on the eve of the election, when Trump insisted the only way he could not win was through fraud and cheating on the other side. But evidence continues to mount that fraud on this scale could never happen. An Associated Press investigation of the 2020 election in six battleground states showed only 475 cases of potential voter fraud out of millions of ballots cast. President Joe Biden had a combined lead of 311,257 votes in all six states.

The Itasca County case shows that officials in even relatively small rural areas (the county’s population is about 45,000) can catch voter fraud. There are lots of checks and balances. Each county conducts election machine tests before each election, in which the machines are tested by inserting incorrectly marked ballots. The public is invited to watch these shows so that the process is transparent. Wrong ballot papers are being caught. The system is working.

If well-intentioned family members can be caught and charged with voting illegally, the system is clearly robust enough to catch those with more malicious intentions.

(c)2024 Free Press (Mankato, Minnesota). Distributed by

Tribune Content Agency, LLC.