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Progressive activist and filmmaker Grace Gato stopped at the Hudson Town Clerk’s Office last November with her mother’s signed absentee ballot application so the elderly Democrat could strike a blow against Donald Trump in the election.

“I’m dropping this off for my mother so she can vote,” Gato reportedly said.

Only one problem: Gatos’s mother, Ruby Cecilia Ponce, was dead. She had passed away about a week earlier.

And despite how Chicago may or may not run its elections, deceased Americans are not legally eligible to vote in New Hampshire.

That fact was pressed upon Gato, 44, on Friday when she was arrested, charged with the misdemeanor crime of wrongful voting.

Now, Gato says her act was merely an homage to her anti-Trump mother, not a sincere  — or legally binding — effort to actually cast a ballot. “It was a symbolic act, not a political one,” Gato says.

In a post on her Substack, Gato weaves a tale of a daughter trying to honor her mother’s dying wish.

“On her deathbed, she made a simple request: ‘Get my ballot,’” Gato wrote. “She had voted in every election for decades, often while hooked to dialysis, determined to do her civic duty even when the system had failed her. When she passed, 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.”

And, she adds, she never crossed the line into violating the law.

“No ballot was signed. None was mailed. No fraudulent vote was ever cast,” Gato wrote.

Gato’s defense — that she planned to bury her mother with the absentee ballot, not vote with it — is a novel one. But it doesn’t appear to be supported by the facts. 

The affidavit from New Hampshire Attorney General Election Law Unit Investigator Cristina Ostrowski points out that a few days before Ponce died on Oct. 15, 2024, Gato made clear on Twitter/X that her mother was going to vote against President Donald Trump.

“My mom is a WWII baby who is going to miss WWIII. She made sure she voted absentee ballot while in hospice care. I just have to mail it. She said make sure that son of a bitch doesn’t win,” Gato wrote.

Six days later, Gato went to the Hudson Town Clerk’s Office with her mother’s signed, absentee ballot application. She reportedly told staff her mother was going to vote with an absentee ballot, though Gato did not mention her mother’s death. Nor did she mention her mother’s dying wish, nor the intention to put the ballot in her casket. The application Gato presented to the clerk was identical to the document she would use to collect a ballot for her mother if she were still alive and ready to cast a mail-in ballot.

“The application included a signature for Ruby Ponce, dated Oct. 13, 2024. On the form, Gato signed an attestation that she assisted the applicant in executing the form because the applicant has a disability,” Ostrowski wrote.

Earlier that day, Town Clerk Michelle Brewster got a letter warning her that Gato planned to illegally vote for her dead mother. When Gato showed up to get her mother’s absentee ballot, the staff made sure she did not get one, Ostrowski said.

Instead, Gato was told her mother’s absentee ballot would be mailed to the house they shared. But Brewster put the Ponce ballot application aside and called the Attorney General’s Office rather than send a ballot to a dead woman, Ostrowski wrote. Gato herself managed to vote via absentee ballot in the Nov. 5, 2024 election.

Ostrowski spoke to Gato on Nov. 12, and the activist acknowledged her mother was in fact dead when she submitted the absentee ballot application.

New Hampshire election law does not take dying wishes into account. The state does consider submitting an absentee ballot application in the name of a dead person a problem, as it leaves the election system vulnerable to fraud. 

Chairman of the House Election Law Committee, Ross Berry (R-Weare), called Gato’s arrest proof positive that the new state law requiring an ID for absentee ballots is necessary.

“Democrats keep insisting voter fraud doesn’t happen in New Hampshire — and then it does. Thankfully, our newly enacted law, SB 287, would have stopped this Democrat activist from committing voter fraud by requiring a simple ID check before an absentee ballot is issued. We passed it because common sense tells you verification matters and today’s arrest proves why. I can only guess why the Democrats fought it,” Berry said.

Dead moms of progressive activists might be a significant voter bloc in New Hampshire elections. Rep. Tim Horrigan (D-Durham) testified before the House last year that his dead mother voted in the 2024 First-in-the-Nation presidential primary. To be fair to Horrigan’s mom, she wasn’t dead when she mailed in her own ballot.

“She was intending to be alive on Jan. 23, but she ended up passing on Jan. 16,” Horrigan said.

Horrigan told the anecdote while he was giving testimony against a proposed law that would have required executors of estates to inform town clerks of a resident’s death to help keep voter rolls current and correct.

Gato blames Brewster and the Attorney General’s Office for misinterpreting her compassion and using state power against a grieving daughter.

“New Hampshire’s wrongful voting statute exists to prevent election fraud — double voting, impersonation, deliberate manipulation of the system. It requires intent to defraud. The facts of my case meet none of those elements,” Gato wrote. “Yet here I am, facing criminal penalties because a clerk mistook compassion for conspiracy.”

Gato is due in Nashua District Court on Nov. 13 for her arraignment where she can try out her grief legal strategy.

“Grief is not voter fraud,” Gato wrote. “And if the State of New Hampshire can’t tell the difference, the problem isn’t the voters. It’s the system.”