Joe Ceballos, the mayor of a small city in rural Kansas, is facing charges carrying a maximum penalty of more than 5 years in prison. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach announced the felony charges, three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury, a day after Caballos was re-elected.
Ceballos appears to have registered and cast ballots in multiple elections, despite not being a citizen but a permanent resident.
Under Kansas law, permanent residents are not allowed to cast ballots or hold public office, something Caballos did multiple times. He is a Mexican citizen holding a green card.
According to Knewz.com, the case has quickly become a heated issue in Kansas, prompting debate over oversight, voter registration systems, and the limits of trust in local government.
The question of Ceballos’ voting and his role as a mayor only raised questions after he applied for citizenship in February of this year. It was then that it was revealed he wasn’t in fact a US citizen.
“He’s been a registered voter since 1990. He applied for citizenship in February of this year, and through that, raised the issue of whether he was a legal citizen,” Coldwater city attorney Skip Herd said.
Attorney General Kobach said the case highlights how vulnerable election systems can be when they depend so heavily on people verifying information themselves.
“In large part, our system right now is based on trust,” Kobach said. “Trust that when the person signed the registration or signs the poll books saying that he’s a qualified elector or that he is a United States citizen, that the person is telling the truth. In this case, we allege that Mr. Ceballos violated that trust.”
He explained, “Noncitizen voting is a real problem. It is not something that happens once in a decade. It is something that happens fairly frequently.”
As per reports, Ceballos commented on the situation and said he was scared. With the Department of Homeland Security now threatening him with starting a deportation, he said, “I haven’t seen Mexico since I was four.
“I don’t speak Spanish anymore. If I get deported it would wreck my life.”
Mayor Joe Ceballos claims he wasn’t aware that he wasn’t allowed to cast a ballot or run for a mayor and that everything is a big misunderstanding.
He doesn’t deny most of what Kobach claims. He arrived in the US as an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, and he did vote despite not being a citizen. At 20, he mistakenly assumed the bold, all-caps “PERMANENT RESIDENT” on his frequently renewed green card meant he was allowed to cast a ballot.
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