A New Hampshire woman is facing wrongful voting charges after she was arrested for allegedly requesting an absentee ballot in the name of her recently deceased mother during the 2024 election.
[RELATED: Non-Citizen Arrested in New Hampshire for Illegally Voting in U.S. Elections…]
The woman, Gracie Gato, of Hudson, NH, claims she requested the ballot to fulfill her mother’s dying wish to be buried with it, and had no intention of using it to vote.
“I went to the Hudson Town Clerk’s office to retrieve her absentee ballot — not to fill it out, not to submit it, but to bury it with her. It was a symbolic act, not a political one. No ballot was signed. None was mailed. No fraudulent vote was ever cast,” said Gato in a post on her Gracie Gato’s Speakeasy substack.
“My mother believed in civic duty until her final breath. I believed that fulfilling her last wish was an act of love. Now I find myself defending that love in a courtroom. Grief is not voter fraud,” she added.
According to the office of NH Attorney General John Formella, which announced the arrest on Monday, Gato used her mother’s name to apply for a ballot while also casting a ballot in her own name.
Formella’s release did not directly accuse Gato of casting the ballot she allegedly requested in her mother’s name.
Prior to her arrest, Gato used her Substack page to address the allegations in two posts, one on October 11 and the other on October 17.
In her first post, she stated that she was ordered to turn herself in by October 17. She vowed in that post that she intends to plead not guilty and claimed that she never forged her mother’s signature, even when requesting a ballot in her name.
“I’ll plead not guilty, because I am not guilty. But the process itself feels punitive. I’m selling my home, caring for my autistic son, and navigating family-court battles that would flatten most people. To add a criminal charge on top of that feels less like justice and more like harassment dressed up as procedure,” said Gato.
In her October 17 post, Gato included images of what appeared to be official court documents charging her with the crime and showing that she was released on personal recognizance bail, with a court appearance set for November 13.
According to her LinkedIn page, Gato is a “filmmaker, screenwriter, and multimedia journalist with over a decade of experience in media production, advocacy storytelling, and communications strategy.”
Her website claims that her articles have appeared in the local Concord Monitor and Union Leader, as well as the Qatar-based Al Jazeera. She also claims to be an activist for domestic violence survivors, Palestine, family court reform, “neurodivergent” children, and NH government accountability.
Based on a review of her Substack page, Gato appears to believe that neither major political party represents her interests. She says she is a convert to Islam and writes extensively on Palestine.
