An Idaho woman has been charged in Pennsylvania with forging mail-ballot applications for ten Dauphin County voters, in a case that began when the county's elections office spotted suspicious paperwork in September and stopped it before any ballot was issued.
Source: WHP via StL30
Kelly Richardson, 31, of Idaho Falls, Idaho, was charged on Friday with 10 counts of identity theft and forgery, according to charging documents reported by WHP, the CBS affiliate in Harrisburg. The charges are allegations set out in a criminal affidavit; Richardson has not been convicted of anything, and a preliminary hearing in the case is still pending, court documents say.
How the applications were flagged
The case goes back to September 25, when ten mail-in ballot requests were turned in to the Dauphin County Elections Office at about 2:45 p.m., the affidavit states. Dauphin County's elections director stopped the applications and reported them to law enforcement, WITF reported on October 14 — weeks before any charge was filed — after the paperwork raised suspicions inside the office.
Investigators then spoke to all ten voters named in the affidavit. Every one of them told officials that their names and most of the information on the ballot requests were accurate — but that neither the signatures nor the Social Security numbers on the forms were theirs, according to the charging documents. That combination, real voter details paired with forged signatures and wrong Social Security numbers, is what turned a paperwork irregularity into a criminal investigation.
WITF's October reporting, based on the county's account, said the applications were rejected and did not result in any ballots being improperly distributed. In other words, the safeguard that caught the forms — a human review inside the county elections office in Harrisburg, the state capital — worked before a single ballot went out.
The 'Mobilize the Message' link and the alleged admissions
A detective working the case interviewed a man who works for an organisation named in the documents as "Mobilize the Message," along with Richardson. Police said they were told this summer that Richardson handed the man the ten forged mail-in ballot requests to turn in to the elections office, and that he did not know they were forged, according to the charging documents.
The affidavit describes two phone calls that followed. At about 1:37 p.m. on October 7, the man spoke with Richardson by phone and told investigators that she admitted forging the signatures on the ten mail-in requests. At about 10:41 a.m. the next day, a detective spoke with Richardson by phone directly, and the documents say she admitted that the signatures had been forged. Those alleged admissions, as described by police in the affidavit, are now the backbone of the prosecution's case; Richardson will have the chance to contest them at her preliminary hearing and at any trial.
When the county first disclosed the episode on October 14, it said an individual associated with a voter turnout group had admitted submitting falsified information on the applications, that the applications were rejected, and that no ballots were improperly distributed as a result. Friday's charges are the first time a defendant has been publicly named.
Why a ten-form case matters
On its face this is a small case — ten forms, one county, no ballot issued. But it lands in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania's capital and the seat of Dauphin County, on the eve of the November 3 midterm elections, in a state where mail voting is used by hundreds of thousands of people and where every election-integrity claim is fought over in public. For Punjabi-American families in Pennsylvania — including trucking families who run the I-81, I-83 and Pennsylvania Turnpike corridors through Harrisburg and often vote by mail because they are on the road — the practical lesson is concrete: check your voter record, sign your own application, and know that a signature that does not match can hold up or kill your ballot.
The case also shows the difference between an application and a ballot. A mail-ballot application is a request, reviewed against voter records before anything is mailed. Because the ten forms carried wrong Social Security numbers and signatures the voters say were not theirs, they were stopped at that review stage — which is precisely the stage at which this kind of alleged forgery is designed to be caught.
What happens next
A preliminary hearing is pending, at which a judge will decide whether the evidence is enough for the charges to proceed toward trial. Richardson is presumed innocent unless and until the charges are proven in court. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when the hearing is scheduled or held, and if county or state election officials issue any further statement about the review that caught the applications.