A Republican bank executive in suburban Pittsburgh faces forgery charges after mailing a voter registration in her dead mother’s name to “test” whether fraud was real, police say.
PennLive reported that Michelle Ziolkowski, 54, of Mt. Lebanon, submitted the application to the Allegheny County elections office in September under the name of her late mother, Fern Winans.
Online court records show she was charged with forgery and tampering with public records. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Dec. 2.
Ziolkowski works as a senior vice president for Truist Financial Corp. Police and election officials say the paperwork was not a clerical mix-up.
WPXI-TV reporting cited in the coverage said Ziolkowski used her own home address on the form and tried to register Winans as a Democrat. Investigators determined the signature on the application matched Ziolkowski’s handwriting, according to the criminal complaint described in that account.
Winans died in September 2021. She had been registered as a Republican. The county canceled that registration the following month.
Years later, her name resurfaced on a fresh application mailed to the same elections office that had already taken her off the rolls.
Allegheny County police said Ziolkowski told them she had heard about voter fraud and “wondered whether it was real,” so she decided to “test” the system.
That explanation does not change the charge. Pennsylvania law still bars forging a registration and tampering with public records. Putting a deceased relative back on the rolls under a new party label is not a civic experiment.
A county spokeswoman told WPXI that Ziolkowski’s case was the only voter fraud case the elections office caught this year. Nearly 520,000 ballots were cast in Allegheny County in Tuesday’s election.
One case caught is not proof that every other ballot was clean. It is proof that at least one person tried to revive a dead registration and got found out.
The sequence is straightforward. The mother dies. The county cancels the registration. Years pass. A new form arrives in the mother’s name, listing a living relative’s address and a different party. Handwriting points back to the daughter. Charges follow.
Election offices are supposed to purge deceased voters. Allegheny County did that in 2021. The later application shows why those list-maintenance steps matter and why mailed registrations still need real scrutiny.
Ziolkowski is a Republican. The form she mailed sought to enroll her mother as a Democrat. Party labels do not legalize forgery. Taxpayers and lawful voters still deserve rolls that list living people who are eligible to vote.
The courts will handle the counts. The public record already shows what the paperwork attempted to do.
When a dead name lands on a registration form, election integrity stops being a slogan and becomes a charging document.
