Poll worker convicted of voting fraud
May 28, 2013
http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20130528/NEWS0107/305280074
A former Hamilton County poll worker was convicted Tuesday of illegal voting and could go to prison for up to six years for it.
Melowese Richardson, 58, of Madisonville pleaded no contest to four counts of illegal voting – including voting three times for a relative who has been in a coma since 2003 – in exchange for prosecutors dropping four other illegal voting charges. Common Pleas Court Judge Robert Ruehlman immediately convicted her, making her a felon.
A poll worker from 1998 until being fired this year, Richardson admitted she voted illegally in the 2008, 2011 and 2012 elections.
Richardson, who was in court last week but asked to speak to her pastor before she agreed to be convicted rather than take the case to trial, was quiet during the hearing.
Her penmanship and familiarity led to her conviction.
“They noticed a bunch of absentee ballots coming from the same place with the same handwriting,” Assistant Prosecutor Bill Anderson said. Other Board of Elections workers then recognized Richardson’s handwriting.
She’s the third person in Hamilton County to be convicted this year for illegal voting.
Unlike Richardson, the other two pleaded guilty and were given diversion.
That means if Sister Marguerite Kloos, 55, of Delhi Township, and Russell Glossop, 76, of Symmes Township, get in no more trouble and do what judges order, their convictions will be erased as if they never happened. Kloos and Glossop, upon the successful completion of diversion, will become eligible again to vote. Both Glossop and Kloos voted for dead people – Glossop for his wife, Kloos for another nun.
Richardson wasn’t offered diversion because she had eight counts of illegal voting against her and because she asked what authorities were going to do to her for illegal voting.
She’ll find that out July 9 when Ruehlman sentences her.
Three others indicted for illegal voting – Margaret I. Allen, 64, formerly of Loveland; Ernestine Strickland, 84, of Memphis, Tenn.; and Andre Wilson, 49, of Winton Hills – also have cases pending. |
