More of President Donald Trump’s supporters engaged in criminal voter fraud

In a striking postscript to the 2024 presidential election, a series of isolated but telling incidents across the country has revealed a handful of President Donald Trump’s own supporters engaging in the very criminal acts of voter fraud that they so often and loudly decry.

While Trump and his allies spent years building a powerful movement around unsubstantiated claims of a stolen 2020 election, the rare, actual instances of election fraud being prosecuted have involved his own backers.

These cases, though isolated and not indicative of widespread fraud, expose a stark contradiction between the political narrative and the legal record.

In Minnesota, 51-year-old Danielle Christine Miller of Nashwauk was convicted for casting a fraudulent vote for Donald Trump in last year’s election by submitting a mail-in ballot for her deceased mother.

According to court documents, Miller told an investigator her mother was an avid Trump supporter who died before receiving an absentee ballot.

Miller pleaded guilty last week to intentionally making or signing a false certificate.

As part of her plea, she claimed she was intoxicated when submitting the mail ballots and was unable to precisely remember what she did, but agreed that the evidence could find her guilty.

Minnesota Ninth Judicial District Judge Heidi Chandler dismissed the other two charges. Miller’s sentence includes up to three years of supervised probation and an $885 fine.

As part of an unconventional sentence, a judge ordered Miller to read a book on the history of voting in America and write a 10-page essay on how election fraud can undermine democracy.

Elsewhere, similar patterns have emerged.

In Virginia, an avid Trump supporter, 67-year-old Richardson Carter Bell, admitted to police that he voted early and then lined up to vote a second time on Election Day.

In Florida, three residents of The Villages, a famously conservative retirement community, were arrested on felony charges for allegedly casting more than one ballot in the 2020 presidential contest. These individuals, who had expressed support for Trump, faced potential prison sentences for their actions.

These prosecutions occur against a backdrop of intense, pre-election focus on alleged Democratic cheating, a narrative that largely evaporated as vote counts confirmed Trump’s victory.

Election experts and officials from both parties have consistently affirmed that the incidence of election fraud is vanishingly small, a fact underscored by the high-profile nature of these few cases when they are discovered.

The system, it seems, is working well when it comes to catching the kind of fraud that is so often imagined, and it is common that the real perpetrators are some of those who shout the loudest about its prevalence.