Jury convicts DFL campaign volunteer of lying in ballot fraud investigation

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted a man who volunteered for a 2020 DFL state senate campaign of lying during an investigation into absentee ballot fraud.

After a day of testimony, the jury of 10 women and two men took just 40 minutes to convict Muse Mohamud Mohamed of two counts of making false statements to a grand jury.

Prosecutors said that Mohamed, who worked on DFL State Sen. Omar Fateh's primary campaign, sent absentee ballots to the Minneapolis elections office on behalf of three people.

In September and October, Mohamed told a grand jury investigating election fraud that the three filled out the ballots themselves, even though evidence presented at trial showed that they had not.

When prosecutors on Monday showed witness Abdiriman Muse, 22, an absentee ballot form purported to be his, Muse testified that his name was misspelled, his address was wrong, and he did not vote in the 2020 primary.

Fateh, who represents south Minneapolis after beating State Senator Jeff Hayden in 2020, did not respond to requests for comment about the case or the verdict.