MINNEAPOLIS — A Hubbard County election judge charged with allowing 11 unregistered voters to cast ballots and an Itasca County woman accused of voting on behalf of her dead mother are two cases receiving a lot of attention over the last month in Minnesota.
Through a data practices request, KARE 11 analyzed all election-related charges and convictions over the last four years.
Since 2020, there have been 123 cases spread throughout the state. The most common crime is "Ineligible voter knowingly votes," which has been charged 61 times since 2020 with Anoka County filing 11 of those cases.
The next most frequent crime is “Register an ineligible voter” which has been charged 17 times since 2020 with Sherburne County accounting for 11 of those cases.
"Our elections have to be honest, they have to be fair, and if people are violating the rules we have to prosecute those people," said Pine County Attorney Reese Frederickson.
Frederickson said, by law, prosecutors have to charge these cases when probable cause is present.
"Whereas in most other statutes, they give prosecutors discretion on charging," Frederickson said.
Some cases of interest across the state include:
Stearns County Sheriff's deputies investigated a case on the campus of St. Cloud State University of a foreign student voting. The student had a green card but was not a citizen, which would make him ineligible to vote.
When confronted, the student told the investigator he was fully transparent with the poll worker, but the poll worker told him he could vote.
In Maple Grove, a man was charged following the 2020 general election with voting twice.
During the campaign, at a stop in North Carolina in September, President Donald Trump seemed to suggest voting by mail and at the polls in order to make sure one's vote is counted.
"Send it in early, then go and vote. And if it's not tabulated, you vote," Trump said in a widely-circulated video clip.
The Maple Grove man did just that and was convicted of a crime. He told an officer he wanted to test the system.
"All the stuff on the news about the election -- and I'm not even a Trump guy -- the whole thing, 'Everybody should vote twice,' I mean, the whole thing is screwed up. On a whim, I made a poor choice," the man told a Maple Grove police officer when confronted with the evidence.
And the Itasca County woman charged last month with submitting her dead mom's ballot is not the only one to allegedly vote on behalf of a loved one.
A McLeod County man admitted he sent in his dead wife's ballot in 2020 as well.
And in Houston County, an ineligible felon who was turned away at the polling place by election workers who told him he could not vote, was convicted of filling out and mailing in the ballot sent to his father.
One of the most egregious cases charged in Minnesota in recent years involved Abdihakim Essa, who is not a U.S. citizen but is a legal permanent resident, signed 13 false absentee ballot certificates for other people plus attempted to vote himself.
The majority of the cases analyzed by KARE 11 involved a felon on probation who's ineligible to vote registering or casting a ballot.
But in 2023 the state legislature changed the law so that a felon's voting rights are restored as soon as released from prison, which presumably will lead to much fewer of these kinds of charges.