Michelle Ziolkowski

Michelle Ziolkowski, 54, of Mt. Lebanon, was charged Thursday, November 6, with forgery and tampering with public records. Both are misdemeanors. WPXI’s Nick Papantonis had it that afternoon. Her biographies call her senior vice president and head of payables at Truist. The station said Truist did not answer, and that the company’s ethics code bans employees from falsifying records.

Investigators say she mailed a voter-registration application to the Allegheny County Elections Division in late September in the name of Fern Winans. Winans was her mother. Winans died in September 2021. A police report said the registration was canceled in October 2021, after the Department of Health told election workers she was dead. Detectives said Winans was a registered Republican. State voting records, as the station cited them, show Ziolkowski is a registered Republican too. The application tried to put Winans back on the rolls as a Democrat, at Ziolkowski’s own address. The signature on the form looked like Ziolkowski’s.

She told investigators she had been getting unsolicited registration applications for Winans in the mail and throwing them out. Then she admitted she filled the forms out and sent them. The police report has the reason. “Ziolkowski stated that she had been hearing about voter fraud and wondered whether it was real. Ziolkowski said she submitted the form by mail to test if voter fraud was possible.”

11 Investigates spoke to her in her driveway on Friday. She said she was never arrested, and she would not answer anything else. A preliminary hearing is set for December 2. Allegheny County spokeswoman Abigail Gardner, for the elections office, said this was the only voter-fraud case the elections team flagged this cycle. The county has more than 925,000 registered voters. More than 519,000 ballots were cast there in the general election this week. The form was caught. No ballot under that canceled registration has been reported.