Kansas isn't the kind of state where you'd expect they'd just let anyone walk in off the streets to vote in their elections. It's a red state with at least some desire to make sure only eligible people are voting. It's not California or New York, after all.
But the recent arrest of one town's mayor suggests that we have bigger election security issues than we thought.
The story isn't particularly new, but it's still something to talk about. After all, it's not every day that a town's mayor turns out to be ineligible to vote, much less hold his office.
The day after a Kansas mayor was re-elected, he was arrested on charges that he had voted despite not being a citizen of the country.
Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said it was a violation of Kansas statutes for an elected official not to be a U.S. citizen.
Coldwater Mayor Jose Ceballos faces three felony counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury, according to KSN-TV.
“He is not a United States citizen,” Kobach said on Wednesday. “He is a legal permanent resident of the United States and a citizen of Mexico.”
Ceballos, who will appear in court next month on the charges, could get 68 months in prison and a fine of up to $200,000 if he is convicted.
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said he believes more “noncitizen voting” may be uncovered as the state uses a federal tool made available by the Trump administration to root out noncitizens on state voter rolls.
“They could be a legal resident but not a citizen, and we want to make sure that gets clarified,” Schwab said. “If they voted, it is a crime.
Ceballos is facing charges stemming from voting in the 2022 general election, 2023 general election, and 2024 primary election. He was also a two-term city council member before being elected mayor in 2021, a post he's ineligible to hold because he's not an American citizen.
And Kansas was blissfully unaware this was happening before the Trump administration provided the correct tools to the state to look into this sort of thing. Kansas, as I already noted, isn't the kind of state that's inclined to just let anyone vote. Ceballos did, though, and no one realized it for several years. That's more than a little disturbing, to say the least.
It makes you wonder just how bad it is in states that don't want to look.
Blue states are far more likely to think that immigrants, both legal and otherwise, should be able to vote in various elections. How many illegal immigrants are voting for pro-illegal immigrant candidates in these blue states, thus impacting our national political conversation due to their meddling?
Our nation's election security is even worse than I thought it was if this were happening in a red state. It's only going to be more pronounced in Democratic strongholds where they don't actually care about our country. I mean, I can't even begin to accept that it's not happening in other red states, for crying out loud, so you know it's worse in California or somewhere like that.
Something needs to be done to address this and address it now.
