American opinion: In Minnesota, the voting system has proven its effectiveness again – Grand Forks Herald

A northern Minnesota woman tried to vote for her dead mother, but ended up in the hands of local authorities who charged her with crimes. This is yet another case that shows that Minnesota’s voting system is not only reliable, but also punishes those who cheat.

Itasca County authorities have charged a woman after she told a sheriff’s lieutenant she filled out a ballot for her mother after her death. The woman was an “ardent” supporter of ex-president Donald Trump and wanted to vote for him before she died. The woman’s daughter is accused of illegally voting and submitting a false certificate of ballot preparation, forging her mother’s signature and dropping it.

The county was alerted to vote fraud after checking the name against a list of names of people who had recently died. The ballot was delivered in October when the woman died in August.

The case comes ahead of an election in which Trump continues to insist that the only way he won’t win is by cheating and deceiving the other party. But there is more and more evidence that such a fraud of this scale could and would never have happened. An Associated Press investigation of the 2020 six-state election found only 475 potential cases of fraud out of millions of votes cast. President Joe Biden had a lead of 311,257 votes in all six states combined.

The case of Itasca County shows that even authorities in relatively small rural areas (the population of the county is about 45,000) can detect election fraud. There are numerous systems of checks and balances. Each constituency conducts voting machine tests before each election, during which the machines are checked by inserting incorrectly marked ballots. The public is invited to watch these demonstrations, so the process is transparent. Incorrect ballots are caught. The system works.

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

Tribuna Content Agency LLC.