A Pennsylvania Republican bank executive faces voter fraud charges for trying to register her dead mother, saying she wanted to test if fraud was real.

Michelle Ziolkowski, a 54-year-old Mt. Lebanon resident and senior vice president at Truist Financial Corp., has been charged with forgery and tampering with public records after she mailed a voter registration application in her late mother’s name to the Allegheny County elections office.

PennLive reported that police say the September mailing used Ziolkowski’s home address near Pittsburgh and sought to put her mother on the rolls as a Democrat. Investigators tied the signature on the form to Ziolkowski’s own handwriting, according to a criminal complaint cited in local coverage.

Her mother, Fern Winans, had been registered as a Republican. Winans died in September 2021. County records show her voter registration was canceled the following month, years before the new application went out.

She told police she was only running a “test”

Allegheny County police say Ziolkowski offered a simple explanation when confronted. She had heard talk about voter fraud, “wondered whether it was real,” and decided to “test” the system.

That is not how lawful oversight works. Filing a registration in a dead person’s name is not a civic experiment. It is the conduct prosecutors now describe as forgery and tampering with public records.

Online court records list those charges against her. A preliminary hearing is set for Dec. 2.

County elections office flags a rare catch

A county spokeswoman said Ziolkowski’s case was the only voter fraud matter the Allegheny County elections office caught this year. Nearly 520,000 ballots were cast in the county in Tuesday’s election.

Officials did not describe any ballot cast in Winans’s name. The documented act is the registration application itself, mailed, signed in the mother’s name, and sent to the elections office under a party label the deceased woman had not carried.

Ziolkowski is identified as a Republican. The form she submitted sought to enroll her mother as a Democrat. That mismatch sits in the complaint alongside the handwriting match and the long-canceled prior registration.

Dead voters and live paperwork

The sequence is straightforward. Winans died in 2021. Her registration came off the books within a month. Years later, a fresh application bearing her name arrived by mail from her daughter’s address in Mt. Lebanon.

Election offices are built to catch exactly this kind of paper. Names get checked against death records. Signatures get compared. When the system works, a form like this does not quietly become a live voter file.

In this instance, Allegheny County’s process did what voters pay it to do. The application did not slip through. Police opened a case. Charges followed. A hearing date is on the calendar.

Ziolkowski holds a senior post at a major bank. That title does not create a special lane around election law. Forgery and tampering with public records are the same offenses whether the defendant works a teller window or a corner office.

Her stated motive, curiosity about whether fraud “was real”, does not rewrite the statute. People who want to audit election procedures can read statutes, file public-records requests, serve as poll watchers, or support lawful observation. They cannot sign a dead relative’s name onto a registration form and call it research.

One prosecuted case is still a prosecuted case

County officials framed the matter as an outlier in their own workload for the year. Outlier status cuts both ways. It shows local detection can work. It also leaves open every case that never reaches a complaint, a handwriting review, or a courtroom.

What is not open to spin is the conduct alleged here. A registration form went out under a decedent’s name. The party choice on the form did not match the mother’s prior affiliation. The signature aligned with the daughter’s writing. Police recorded her explanation that she was testing the system. Prosecutors filed forgery and public-records charges. Dec. 2 will start the court process.

Election integrity is not a vibe. It is chain-of-custody rules, death-record matches, signature checks, and real penalties when someone tries to put a ghost back on the rolls. Allegheny County treated it that way.

Voters should expect every county to do the same, no excuses, no free passes, and no “tests” that end with someone else’s name on the form.