We study the finite element approximation of the solid isotropic material with penalization (SIMP) model for the topology optimization of the compliance of a linearly elastic structure. To ensure the existence of a minimizer to the infinite-dimensional problem, we consider two popular restriction methods: $W^{1,p}$-type regularization and density filtering. Previous results prove weak(-*) convergence in the solution space of the material distribution to an unspecified minimizer of the infinite-dimensional problem. In this work, we show that, for every isolated minimizer, there exists a sequence of finite element minimizers that strongly converges to the minimizer in the solution space. As a by-product, this ensures that there exists a sequence of unfiltered discretized material distributions that does not exhibit checkerboarding.