In a case that has jolted concerns over mail-in voting and ballot security, a former U.S. Postal Service employee in Colorado has pleaded guilty to charges stemming from an election-rigging scheme during the 2024 presidential race. The defendant, 64-year-old Vicki Stuart, admitted in court Monday to engaging in forgery and identity theft — all in an effort to steal ballots and cast votes fraudulently.
Stuart now faces possible prison time after entering into a plea deal with prosecutors, who initially charged her with 34 counts related to the plot. She and a co-conspirator, Sally Jane Maxedone, allegedly intercepted dozens of mail-in ballots while Stuart was working as a USPS employee in Mesa County, directly handling ballots en route to their legitimate recipients.
Stuart’s illegal operation began unraveling when voters started flagging discrepancies. Despite the state’s ballot tracking system showing their votes had been received and counted, multiple Coloradans reported they never received their ballots at all.
Upon investigation, authorities traced the activity back to Stuart’s mail route. Ballots had been opened, filled out for the pair’s preferred candidate, and sent in fraudulently — a direct assault on election integrity from within a system entrusted to protect it.
“I feel like I am guilty for the part that I played in it,” Stuart confessed before Judge Brian Flynn, signaling acceptance of a plea arrangement that could substantially reduce her sentence but still carries serious legal consequences.
According to the Colorado Legal Defense Group, identity theft — a Class 4 felony — carries up to six years in prison and a $500,000 fine per count, while the forgery charge could add up to five more years behind bars.
While Colorado ultimately swung blue by a comfortable margin in 2024, the Stuart case is far from isolated. Massachusetts, another deep-blue state, has seen multiple Democrat-linked ballot tampering scandals in recent years, including a 2023 incident involving cash-for-votes offers.
More broadly, the vulnerability of mail-in voting has sparked renewed calls for reform. House Republicans recently passed the SAVE Act, which would require qualified voter ID for federal elections. Though the legislation remains stalled in the Senate, polling shows strong bipartisan public support: a 2024 Gallup survey found 84% of Americans favor voter ID laws.
The Stuart case underscores what critics of all-mail voting have warned for years: even a small number of bad actors, placed strategically, can exploit weaknesses in the system — particularly when USPS workers or election officials themselves are involved.
And fraud isn’t the only concern. In Washington State, hundreds of ballots were burned in a 2024 arson case believed to be politically motivated. In Arizona, the Democratic Secretary of State’s office mistakenly mailed 100,000 ballots to the wrong voters, triggering bipartisan backlash in a state that ultimately broke for Trump by a razor-thin margin.
