Mesa County Woman Won't Serve Time for Ballot Fraud Scheme

Sally Maxedon was sentenced Tuesday, July 15, after pleading guilty to her role in an election fraud scheme last year.

According to prosecutors, Maxedon's friend, Vicki Stuart, took ballots from Mesa County residents' mail, and Maxedon helped fill them out and submit them. Stuart, a former mail carrier, pleaded guilty last month and was sentenced to five years in prison for masterminding the caper.

Maxedon, aged sixty, received a 24-month sentence but the judge deferred the prison time, also sentencing her to two years of probation and 100 hours of community service. The sentencing disparity between the two women is due to Maxedon's cooperation in the case against Stuart. The two had claimed they were trying to "test" the mail-in election system in Colorado.

But Stuart and Maxedon's "test" of the system proved it works. The women were alleged to have stolen about twenty ballots addressed to a subdivision where Stuart delivered mail. Three of the stolen ballots were counted as legitimate before the fraud was caught by residents who were notified by the BallotTrax system that their ballot had been counted before they'd filled it out. The remainder of the fraudulently voted ballots were caught by the system before they were counted.

Stuart and Maxedon's ballot escapades came just after former Mesa County clerk Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in state prison for allowing unauthorized access to voting equipment in the county. The Trump Administration and its Department of Justice have been agitating for Peters' release, though she is imprisoned on state charges, not federal charges, and the DOJ is impotent to change her sentence.

Election-related crimes in Colorado aren't limited to Mesa County, however. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Jena Griswold's office sent out a press release announcing a man was arrested in late June for firebombing the Archuleta County Clerk and Recorder's Office on June 12. William Wayne Bryant, 71, allegedly threw a "Molotov cocktail-type device" into a room where the clerk's office stores voting equipment.

"It is appalling that a Colorado elections office was firebombed, and even more so that the suspect has a history of spreading election conspiracies," Griswold said in the release. "Attacks on democratic institutions must be strongly condemned."