Two women, one of them a U.S. Postal Service employee, have been charged with stealing mail ballots in Mesa County this year and then fraudulently casting them.
Prosecutors announced Wednesday that Vicki Lyn Stuart, the USPS employee, and Sally Jane Maxedon are suspected of forgery, identity theft and attempting to influence a public servant.
Maxedon told authorities she conspired with Stuart, a mail carrier, to “test” the state’s voter signature verification system by stealing ballots, forging voter signatures on them and then fraudulently casting them.
According to authorities, the two women intercepted the mail ballots this year before they could reach their intended recipients.
Maxedon, 59, is registered as a Republican voter in Colorado. Stuart, 64, is registered as an unaffiliated voter.
Of the fraudulently voted ballots, three made it through the state’s signature review process and the votes cast on them could not be recalled. Authorities did not say which candidates received votes on the fraudulently cast ballots.
Ballot signatures in Colorado are verified by either an automated process or election judges or both. If the automatic system or a judge suspects an issue, they advance the ballot to a secondary check in which a bipartisan team of judges reviews them.
Mesa County’s automated process initially flagged the signatures on the three ballots that made it through for additional review. They were then reviewed by the same election judge who advanced them to be tabulated instead of sending them to a further bipartisan review process. The judge, who is not accused of malfeasance, was reassigned after the scheme was discovered.
All signatures on ballots cast in Mesa County this election are receiving additional scrutiny to prevent more fraudulent votes from being counted.
Prosecutors listed 16 victims on the charging documents for Stuart and Maxedon. State elections officials initially said 12 ballots were stolen and fraudulently cast in the scheme.
Prosecutors wrote in charging documents that there may be as many as 20 victims of the ballot scheme.
Court documents show investigators linked Maxedon and Stuart to the scheme by interviewing USPS workers and by checking for fingerprints on the fraudulently cast ballots. The fingerprints matched ones in a law enforcement database belonging to Maxedon.
Maxedon appears to be the same person who was arrested in Mesa County in 2008 on suspicion of possession of materials to make methamphetamine, possession of a controlled substance with intent to sell and possession of a controlled substance.
The ballot scheme was discovered by elections officials in Mesa County in October through the state’s signature verification process.
The signatures on each mail ballot submitted are checked against a voter’s signature the state has on file. If the signatures don’t match, election officials reach out to the voter to offer them an opportunity to remedy the situation through a process known as “curing.”
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When election officials recently reached out to a group of voters to help them cure the signature problems with their ballots, the voters informed the Mesa County Clerk and Recorder’s Office that they hadn’t voted. That triggered an investigation and led to the discovery of a dozen stolen and fraudulently cast ballots.
Nine of the fraudulently cast ballots were flagged and removed from the tabulation process before they could be counted. Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said the three that made it through couldn’t be rescinded because of the state’s confidential ballot-casting process.
“Once signatures are checked, the ballot is pulled independently from the envelope and it’s put into the (counting) process,” she said at a news conference in October.
In other words, once a ballot is entered into the tabulation process, it’s anonymous and can’t be linked back to the envelope it came in.
For context: There were more than 94,600 ballots cast in Mesa County this year. Those three ballots represent less than 0.003% of the total ballots cast in the county.
Matt Crane, who leads the Colorado County Clerks Association, said election officials work hard to identify signature discrepancies on ballots. Election judges are trained by the state on how to identify anomalies, and some county clerks even go above and beyond that by bringing in a forensic handwriting expert to offer further guidance.
Mesa County is a Republican-dominated part of the state. It’s been central to election conspiracies peddled by conservatives in recent years, including former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, a Republican, who was recently convicted in a 2021 security breach of the county’s election system.
Peters was sentenced to nine years behind bars, including eight and a half years in prison