DENVER — A 70-year-old Castle Rock woman was sentenced earlier this year to 20 days in jail for casting her dead landlord’s ballot in Colorado’s presidential primary election last year, a spokesman with the 23rd Judicial District Attorney’s Office said Friday.
Joy Beth Lewis, 70, pleaded guilty in December to personating an elector, a Class 1 misdemeanor, after signing and submitting a ballot that wasn’t hers during the March 5, 2024, Colorado presidential primary.
Lewis was caught after the widow of the deceased landlord contacted the Douglas County Clerk and Recorder’s Office notifying them that she had received a message that her husband, who had died 11 months earlier, had cast his ballot for the Colorado presidential primary, according to an arrest affidavit in the case.
The Douglas County District Attorney’s Office followed up with the widow, who said that the property in Castle Rock from which the vote was submitted had been leased since at least December of 2023 after she and her husband moved from Colorado to New Mexico in the first few months of 2020, arresting documents show.
On May 31, 2024, officials from the District Attorney’s Office visited the home in Castle Rock where they were met by Lewis, who initially denied signing and submitting her dead landlord’s ballot. But after explaining that the DA’s office would have to submit the ballot as evidence of voter fraud and have it submitted for DNA, fingerprint and handwriting analysis, Lewis confirmed the handwriting on the ballot was hers, the affidavit states.
When asked why she signed her dead landlord’s ballot, Lewis replied she “got sick of forwarding their mail. So, I just voted for him,” according to the affidavit.
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She told the DA official she was not aware the man she signed the ballot for had died.
When the DA official told her that casting someone else’s ballot was a crime, Lewis said “she did not realize it was ‘serious’" and she “thought it was OK to send it in,” the documents show.
Following that encounter, the DA’s office then went to the Douglas County Clerk and Recorder in early June where staff confirmed that Lewis had also cast her own ballot for the presidential primary and that her vote was accepted.
About three weeks later, on June 24, the DA’s office then notified Lewis that she would only be getting a ticket for the crime for signing and submitting her dead landlord’s ballot. In response, she said she didn’t know “why I did that,” documents show.
On July 3, the affidavit states, Lewis went to the Douglas County DA’s office at the request of the official, who told her she would only be getting a ticket and was free to leave after that.
“This case shows how the layers of security built into our elections process work to ensure its integrity,” said Douglas County Clerk and Recorder Sheri Davis, the county’s chief election official, in a statement Friday.
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