SC College Dean Accused of Voter Fraud

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Accused of sending in a ballot for another Sister of Charity who died before absentee ballots were mailed out, Sr. Marge Kloos is Dean of Arts at the College of Mount St. Joseph.

UPDATE: See our March 13 followup story .

A dean at a Cincinnati Catholic college, Sister of Charity Marge Kloos, is being investigated for voter fraud in the 2012 national election.

Sr. Marge, dean of arts at the College of Mount Saint Joseph, lived in the same house as Sr. Sr. Rose Marie Hewitt, SC, who died on Oct. 4th, 2012. The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that an absentee ballot in her name, signed and dated Oct. 3rd, was cast — but that the Board of Elections did not drop off the 60,000 absentee ballots to the Post Office until Oct. 4th.

The ballots, then, could not have been received until Oct. 5th at the earliest.

The Enquirer did not name Sr. Marge in its Thursday story, because she had not been charged with a crime and her name did not appear in official correspondence about the matter, but Channel 9 News named her in its Wednesday night lead stories.

In a letter to Board of Elections Chairman Tim Burke, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said “there is probable cause to believe that criminal activity has occurred” concerning the ballot, and that the Board of Elections should take no further action in the case.

According to the Enquirer, several other cases of improper voting are being looked at by both the Board of Elections and the Prosecutor’s office, including another instance of an absentee ballot being cast for a person who died before the ballots were mailed. No cases of voter fraud have been filed in the county for several years, the Enquirer says, because improper voting has generally been found to be the result of confusion rather than fraud.

Sr. Marge is a graduate of United Theological Seminary and the University of Dayton. She is also an associate professor in the Department of Religious and Pastoral studies at Mount St. Joe’s where, according to the college’s web site, she “has taught a number of interdisciplinary courses drawing on eco-theology… [and] has also done research in feminist methodologies for cross-cultural spiritual care.” She leads immersion course trips to the US-Mexico border and Cherokee, NC, and was the school’s 1999 recipient of the Adele Clifford Excellence in Teaching Award.

UPDATE: According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, Sr. Marge admitted to investigators that she had voted for Sr. Rose Marie. “According to investigators, the nun tearfully confessed to having voted for her dead friend, at one point holding out her wrists as if to be handcuffed and saying: ‘I did it,’” reported Barry Horstman in a story dated Feb. 23, 2013.

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