In a case that’s reigniting national concerns over election integrity, two women in Mesa County, Colorado, have been arrested for stealing and fraudulently casting at least a dozen mail-in ballots. The 21st Judicial District Attorney’s Office announced Wednesday that Vicki Lyn Stuart—a U.S. Postal Service employee at the time—and Sally Jane Maxedon (also known as Sally Smith) now face felony charges, including identity theft, forgery, and attempting to influence a public servant, according to multiple reports.
Court documents allege Stuart exploited her postal route to intercept mailed ballots during Colorado’s early voting period in October 2023. Maxedon admitted to filling out ballots that weren’t hers, initially spinning a bizarre story about testing the system on behalf of a state investigator. She later confessed Stuart had handed her the ballots shortly after they began arriving in mailboxes across Grand Junction.
State officials were alerted on October 21 after voters reported signature discrepancies on ballots they had neither received nor returned. Three fraudulent ballots made it into the official count before being flagged and withdrawn. Authorities believe the total number of victims could exceed 20.
The case is being investigated by a coalition including the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Attorney General’s Office, and the 21st Judicial District Attorney. Five seized ballots have been prioritized for fingerprint analysis.
Mesa County Clerk Bobbie Gross praised the swift response. “Our security measures worked,” she said. “And we’ll continue to be vigilant.”
But the incident lands in the middle of a broader political storm. As Republicans rally behind the SAVE Act—a bill that would require documentary proof of citizenship to vote—Democrats are calling foul. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer denounced the bill as “a destructive, dangerous voter suppression law” and likened it to Jim Crow. “It’s not about election security,” he said. “It’s about suppressing the vote.”
Schumer noted that over 21 million Americans lack birth or citizenship certificates, and half the country doesn’t have a passport. He vowed that the SAVE Act would be “dead on arrival” in the Senate, insisting that noncitizen voting is already illegal under existing federal and state law.
The Colorado case exposes a fault line in the debate: how to secure elections without disenfranchising legitimate voters. As partisan tensions escalate, both sides are seizing on the incident to frame the stakes—either as proof of systemic vulnerability or as political pretext.
[Read More: Israel May Have To Do What It Never Wanted To Do]
