Hudson Podcaster Wants Voting Fraud Case Dismissed, Says She Was 'Lawfully Assisting' Her Dead Mom's Vote

By Damien Fisher, NH Journal

With her trial in an illegal voting case approaching, Hudson podcaster Gracie Gato says it’s not illegal to help elderly people like her mother vote.

Prosecutors’ response? “Elderly” is not the same as “dead.”

Gato, 45, was arrested last year and charged with wrongful voting for allegedly trying to obtain an absentee ballot in the name of her deceased mother, Ruby Cecilia Ponce.

Gato is now trying to get her criminal case dismissed before it goes to trial in Nashua District Court. According to a motion recently filed by her attorney, William Aivalikles, the law does not penalize people who help the elderly get a ballot and fill it out.

“The statute criminalizes intentional voter impersonation and wrongful voting. It does not criminalize lawful assistance provided to a voter completing an absentee ballot application,” Aivalikles wrote.

But, as Assistant Attorney General David Lovejoy notes, Gato’s mother needed more than assistance to be able to vote a week after she died.

“This line of argument, of course, ignores that legally dispositive fact that at the time [Gato] was applying for a ballot in the name of her mother — purportedly to ‘assist’ her elderly mother in obtaining an absentee ballot — her mother was deceased and obviously could no longer vote, with or without any assistance. It naturally begs the question of what [Gato] would have done with her deceased mother’s absentee ballot had she been able to obtain it,” Lovejoy wrote.

Ponce died Oct. 15, 2024, an event Gato wrote about on her blog on Oct. 21, 2024. That same day, she went to the Hudson town clerk’s office to get an absentee ballot for Ponce, according to court records. Gato brought her mother’s absentee ballot application and asked to bring the ballot home.

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

When the deputy clerk refused to hand the ballot to Gato and explained that it would be mailed to Ponce, Gato became upset, according to court records. That is when she reportedly told the deputy clerk that her anti-Trump-voting mother had passed on.

Gato admitted to seeking her dead mother’s ballot in a 2025 blog post, soon after the charges were brought. Gato claimed at the time she had no intention of casting a ballot for her mother, but that the exercise was an expression of grief.

“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.”

It will now be up to the court to sort out grief from alleged criminality. Gato’s trial had been scheduled for March, but her attorney’s medical issues delayed proceedings. A new trial date has yet to be scheduled.

The story of Gato’s involvement in New Hampshire politics took another twist last month when she was named communications director for Rep. Ellen Read, D-Newmarket. That makes Read the only rank-and-file House member with her own communications staff.

Representing the notoriously erratic Read could be a big job. She was the only elected U.S. politician to participate in a scandal-plagued flotilla attempting to reach Hamas-controlled Gaza last year. She was also the force behind the display of a pagan statue of the goat-headed demon Baphomet outside the State House during the Christmas season.

Read’s behavior in the House recently earned the lawmaker a partial ban from entering the House chamber. It was soon after this incident that Read announced she was bringing Gato on to handle her communications.

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.