The mayor of a small south-central Kansas town has been charged with committing fraud by voting in elections since 2022 even though he is not a United States citizen, the state’s attorney general and secretary of state said Wednesday.
Attorney General Kris Kobach said Joe Ceballos, who garnered nearly 83% of the vote Tuesday for a second term as Coldwater mayor, was charged with three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury. Both are felony offenses.
“These charges carry a potential maximum penalty of up to 68 months imprisonment and up to $200,000 in fines,” Kobach said.
The charges, filed in Comanche County, are based on Ceballos’ voting in the 2022 general election, the 2023 general election for local offices and the 2024 primary election, Kobach said.
Ceballos served two terms on the Coldwater City Council and was elected mayor in 2021, a position he is not qualified to hold if he is not a U.S. citizen although it is not a criminal violation, Kobach said.
He referenced a Kansas statute that requires a city officer to be a qualified elector, which requires that person to be a United States citizen.
“He is a legal permanent resident of the United States and a citizen of Mexico,” Kobach said.
Schwab said it would be up to the local governing board to make a determination about the mayoral race after the election is finalized.
Coldwater government leaders did not find out about the situation until Wednesday. …
During a news conference in Topeka, Kobach and Secretary of State Scott Schwab said the state is actively pursuing cases like this by using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which can be queried by states to determine a voter’s U.S. citizenship status.
According to The Center Square, 26 states are using the database to verify voter registration information. Schwab confirmed Kansas has begun using the SAVE database to check voter registrations, but also said the case against Ceballos was not compiled using the database.
Kobach has waged a campaign for years claiming significant voter fraud and pushing for stricter voting regulations, including proof of citizenship laws and showing photo identification at the polls.
Schwab, who is the state’s top elections officer, said until Kansas began recently using the SAVE database, he had disagreed with Kobach that there was much of an issue.
“We’re currently verifying. We don’t want any false positives, but attorney general, be prepared to be busy as we go through these and find out potential positives of people who are non-U.S. citizens that have voted,” Schwab said. “I was never really a big believer this happened. I always came from the angle of, let’s prove it’s not happening, and then we get the data, and it’s important we clean this up.”
Kobach said he expects there will be hundreds of people on the voter rolls who are not legally eligible to vote. Although that may be a small number compared to the 2 million registered to vote in Kansas, it matters, he said. …