Pittsburgh bank executive charged with voter fraud

MT. LEBANON, Pa. — A Mt. Lebanon woman was charged Thursday on accusations that she attempted to register to vote under her dead mother’s name.

Investigators said Michelle Ziolkowski, 54, mailed a registration application to the Allegheny County Elections Division in late September under the name Fern Winans.

Winans died in September 2021. A police report said her registration was canceled in October 2021 after the Department of Health notified election workers about her death.

Detectives said Winans was a registered Republican. Ziolkowski, who state voting records showed is also a registered Republican, was Winans’ daughter, and attempted to re-register her as a Democrat under her own address.

They said the signature for Winans on her new application resembled Ziolkowski’s handwriting.

Investigators said Ziolkowski initially claimed she received unsolicited registration applications for Winans in the mail and discarded them but later admitted to filling out the forms and submitting them to the elections office.

“Ziolkowski stated that she had been hearing about voter fraud and wondered whether it was real,” officers wrote in their report. “Ziolkowski said she submitted the form by mail to test if voter fraud was possible.”

Ziolkowski was charged with forgery and tampering with public records, both misdemeanors. 11 Investigates spoke to her in her driveway Friday. She clarified that she was never arrested and declined to answer additional questions.

Her biographies state she works as the Senior Vice President, Head of Payables at Truist Financial Corporation. Truist requires its employees to undergo annual ethics training and a Code of Ethics sent to investors includes language banning employees from falsifying records. 11 Investigates reached out to Truist for comment but did not get a response.

Allegheny County spokeswoman Abigail Gardner, who represents the elections office, said Ziolkowski’s case was the only instance of voter fraud flagged by the elections team this cycle. More than 925,000 voters are registered in the county and more than 519,000 ballots were cast in the general election this week.

Voter fraud exists, but is exceedingly rare. An analysis by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice found rates between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent of ballots cast, which translates to between three and 25 incidents per one million votes.

In the six swing states in the 2020 election, an analysis of 25 million ballots cast by the Associated Press found 473 potential cases of voter fraud, which was within the Brennan Center’s estimated range. Many of the questionable ballots were caught and never counted, the analysis reported.

“Yes, there is voter fraud. It has never been found to be significant in turning an election,” The Brookings Institution’s Elaine Kamarck, an election security expert, said. “The people are very much aware of it and alert to it, and they catch you. So don’t do it.”

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