Mayor from Mexico charged with illegal voting in Kansas elections

Kansas leaders filed a lawsuit Wednesday against Joe Ceballos, the mayor of a small rural Kansas town, alleging he voted in several elections but was not a U.S. citizen.

Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, both Republican elected officials, announced they have 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 as a city councilman.

States are required by law to have mechanisms in place to regularly clean voter registration lists, also known as voter rolls. The process includes using external databases to screen non-citizens, which Kobach, a longtime immigration hawk and ally of President Donald Trump, said is not error-proof.

“Non-citizen voting is a real problem. It’s not something that happens once every ten years. It’s something that happens quite frequently,” Kobach said, echoing broader sentiments among Republicans who say voter fraud is a pressing problem.

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Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach speaks during a rally with President Donald Trump at the Kansas Expocenter October 6, 2018, in Topeka, Kansas. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

The charges against Ceballos, which include perjury and voting without reservation, according to the complaint reviewed by Fox News Digital, carry a maximum sentence of more than five years in prison. Ceballos did not respond to a request for comment.

Kobach, who previously served as Kansas secretary of state, has long advocated for stronger immigration enforcement and stricter voter ID laws. In 2018, he lost a high-profile federal lawsuit after trying to enforce a state law requiring voters to provide physical documents verifying U.S. citizenship when registering to vote, which a court ruled exceeded the requirements needed to confirm citizenship, in violation of federal election laws.

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A voter places an absentee ballot into a drop box. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya, file)

The court said at the time that the state law could not “be justified by the scant evidence of voter fraud by noncitizens before and after the law’s passage.”

Kobach did not detail how state officials learned the mayor and former city councilman was believed to be a non-citizen, but he said investigators had “compelling evidence” against Ceballos.

Boxes of signatures are displayed after a new conference hosted by Citizens for Voter ID at the Nebraska Capitol building on July 7, 2022, in Lincoln, Nebraska. (Noah Riffe/Lincoln Journal Star via AP)

Kobach said municipal officials, such as mayors, are also required by law to be U.S. citizens, which the attorney general said was “worth noting” but did not constitute a criminal offense. Ceballos was on the reelection ballot on Election Day, but official results have not yet been certified.

“Largely, our current system is based on trust, trust that when the person signs the registration or signs the voter records saying they’re a qualified voter or they’re a U.S. citizen, they’re 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 taking advantage of a federal government database that cross-checks voter rolls with immigration records, which they say will lead them to identify more election violations.

Ceballos’ first court appearance will be on December 3.