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Kansas leaders on Wednesday filed criminal charges against Joe Ceballos, the mayor of a small town in rural Kansas, alleging he voted in several elections but is not a US citizen.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, both elected Republicans, announced they had filed six charges in Comanche County against Ceballos, a legal permanent resident of Mexico, for voting in the 2022, 2023 and 2024 elections.
Ceballos is the mayor of Coldwater and previously served on the city council.
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States are required by law to have mechanisms in place to regularly purge voter registration rolls, also known as voter rolls. The process involves using external databases to screen noncitizens, which Kobach, a longtime immigration advocate and ally of President Donald Trump, said is not foolproof.
“Non-citizen voting is a real problem. This is not something that happens once a decade. This is something that happens quite often,” Kobach said, echoing broader sentiment among Republicans who say voter fraud is a pressing issue.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach speaks at a rally with President Donald Trump at the Kansas Expo Center on October 6, 2018 in Topeka, Kansas. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Ceballos' charges, which include perjury and voting without qualification, carry a maximum penalty of more than five years in prison, according to the complaint reviewed by Fox News Digital. Ceballos did not respond to requests for comment.
Kobach, who previously served as Kansas Secretary of State, has a long history of advocating for stricter immigration enforcement and enforcement. voter ID laws. In 2018, he lost a high-profile federal lawsuit after trying to enforce a state law that required voters to provide physical proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote.
The court found that the company exceeded the required requirements to prove citizenship, in violation of federal election law.
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The voter places the absentee ballot in the box. (AP Photo/Paul Sancia, File)
At the time, the court said the state law could not be “justified by the meager evidence of voter fraud by noncitizens before and after the law's enactment.”
Kobach did not specify how government officials learned the mayor and former city councilman was allegedly a noncitizen, but he said investigators have “overwhelming evidence” against Ceballos.
Boxes of signatures are displayed after a conference hosted by Citizens for Voter ID at the Nebraska Capitol building on July 7, 2022 in Lincoln, Nebraska. (Noah Rieff/Lincoln Journal Star via AP)
Kobach said city officials such as mayors are also required by law to be U.S. citizens, which the attorney general said is “worth noting” but is not a criminal offense. Ceballos was on the ballot for re-election Election Daybut the official results have not yet been confirmed.
“To a large extent, our system now is based on trust, the belief that when a person signs a registration form or signs poll books saying that they are a qualified voter or a citizen of the United States, that person is telling the truth,” Kobach said. “In this case, we allege that Mr. Ceballos violated that trust.”
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Kobach and Schwab said they recently began using a federal government database that helps check voter rolls against immigration records, which they expect will allow them to identify more voting irregularities.
Ceballos' first court appearance will take place on December 3.
