Amy Rolfes may only have a little more than a year’s worth of experience in government under her belt, but the St. Joseph County clerk knew something wasn’t right when a batch of ballot petitions came into her office last month. Upon further review, Rolfes and her team discovered that much was wrong with the dozens of petition pages aimed at securing long-shot Democrat presidential candidate Dean Phillips’ place on the Indiana ballot.
As I recently reported, St. Joseph County elections officials ultimately determined that just 19 of more than 500 signatures were valid in what appears to be a stunning case of ballot petition fraud.
“Curiously, there were addresses that simply did not exist. The streets did, but not the house numbers,” the clerk said. “We would look through and compare the signatures but there was nothing like them in the statewide system.”
“We kept saying, ‘That’s not valid. That’s not valid,’” she added.
The elections administration team reviewed each page, each signature, comparing names, birth dates, addresses, and penmanship to those in a statewide voter registration system. It was painstaking work, but every election official should pay such attention to detail — and the law.
An Educator’s Life
Rolfes’ professional life had nothing to do with running elections and a government office. She graduated from the University of Michigan with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. For about a decade, Rolfes ran one of the first child care centers in the Michigan Veterans Affairs hospital system.
