DENVER — A postal worker and her acquaintance were taken into custody on Wednesday for allegedly forging stolen mail-in ballots as part of a purported effort to assess the security of Colorado’s electoral system, as stated in court documents.

Vicki Lyn Stuart, a mail carrier, along with her friend Sally Jane Maxedon, faces charges related to identity theft, efforts to influence a public official, and forgery according to their respective arrest affidavits. Currently, there are no recorded legal representatives for either individual in the court filings, and neither has been formally indicted at this time.

The office of the 21st District Attorney, Dan Rubinstein, indicated that the investigation began on October 21. This decision followed reports from residents who had neither requested nor received mail-in ballots, only to find out that their ballots were not counted due to mismatches in signatures.

In Colorado, mail-in voting is the prevalent method, praised by officials for being a secure and convenient way to participate in elections without facing long waits or last-minute complications on election day. Voters receive their ballots through the mail and can return them either by post or by dropping them into designated ballot boxes. To verify the authenticity of the votes, election personnel compare the signatures on the ballot envelopes with those they have stored on file.

The Colorado Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, announced that an investigation into the matter of stolen and forged ballots had commenced the previous month. During that announcement, she disclosed that at least 12 ballots were unlawfully taken in Mesa County and submitted containing fraudulent votes, with three of those having been mistakenly counted by the county’s election officials in the recent election.

Once the ballots are extracted from their security envelopes, which do not contain any identifying signatures, it becomes impossible to trace them back to their original voters.

The affidavits regarding the arrests mention that investigators are still in the process of locating and confirming the identities of victims, with estimates suggesting that more than 20 individuals may have had their ballots pilfered.

Mesa County has been under scrutiny following the recent sentencing of former county clerk Tina Peters, who faced prison for her involvement in a data-breach case that stemmed from unsubstantiated claims of fraud related to voter machines during the 2020 presidential election.