West Virginia mail carrier pleads guilty to altering absentee ballot forms, claims it was 'a joke'

A rural mail carrier in West Virginia pleaded guilty Thursday to one count of attempted election fraud and another count of "injury to the mail," the U.S. Attorney's Office for Northern West Virginia announced. The contract mail man, Thomas Cooper, used black ink to alter eight primary ballot requests, marking five of them from "Democrat" to "Republican" and changing three in other ways, prosecutors said.

The Pendleton County clerk spotted the obvious alterations and alerted state officials, sparking an investigation involving the state attorney general's office, U.S. postal inspectors, and federal prosecutors. West Virginia mailed all registered voters absentee ballot requests to encourage mail-in voting in the state's June 9 primary. If the tampered ballot requests had not been caught, five people requesting to vote in the Democratic primary would have received Republican primary ballots.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted several states to move to mail-in voting out of safety concerns. Mail-in vote fraud does happen but it's very rare, and this case was pretty inconsequential. One of the investigators interviewing Cooper, 47, asked if he was "just being silly" and he replied yes, he did it "as a joke." He will be sentenced at a later date.

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