The thread title says it all. Coldwater, Kansas, is a town of about 700 in SW Kansas. The mayor, Jose Ceballos, was first elected in 2021, and he ran unopposed yesterday.
He is a legal resident and applied for citizenship in February. That action probably got the attention of somebody, and now the Kansas AG, Kris Kobach, has charged him with 3 counts of voter fraud. In his typical grandstanding fashion, Kobach waited until the day after the election to file charges.
Interestingly, this guy has been a registered voter since 1990. A decade ago, Kobach was leading a charge to rid Kansas of all voter fraud. Guess this guy evaded that crack investigation.
The mayoral election was apparently non-partisan. But 83 percent of the voters in Comanche County Kansas went for Trump, and 41 percent of the people in the county live in the county seat of Coldwater. I see no indication Coldwater is a political outlier within the county. So this could be an intra-GOP issue.
If anyone finds Mayor Ceballos’s date of birth, we could then look up his registration to be sure.
I believe it’s an extension of Kobach’s anti-voter-fraud campaign from a decade ago, when he found no proof of non-citizens voting. Now he’s got one, and he will continually use this as an example of the massive fraud within our voting process.
Kobach sucks, but I can’t argue with his actions here. AFAICT the vast majority of noncitizen voters (a tiny group, to be sure) are just dumbshits who don’t understand how the system works and weren’t trying to commit fraud. Generally, it would be unjust to throw the book at them. I think it’s reasonable to hold elected officials to a much higher standard for understanding of basic civics.
Coldwater City Attorney Skip Herd said Ceballos is a green card holder and there were red flags raised with his interest in pursuing permanent citizenship.
“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,” Herd said.
His application for citizenship raised questions about whether he was a citizen? I guess that’s one way of putting it…
Population 687 – the great majority of them Trump voters.
Assuming guilt, there is zero public interest in doing anything other than telling the man to stop voting unless and until he becomes a citizen. This is a classic situation in which prosecutorial discretion means you walk away due to lack of real harm.
It may be that some townsfolk are hypocrites who voted for Trump and then went onto social media to ask for an exception to nativism when it hit home. But one step at a time.
I would argue about the timing of the arrest. Presumably the AG had known about this for several months, yet waited until the day after he was elected to bring the charges.
Kobach is a grandstanding he’ll, but I really don’t understand how this is controversial. Non-citizens cannot vote or hold office. Any reasonably aware non-citizen knows this. It’s a certainly impossible to register to vote without figuring out it, because it’s all over the registration documents. (I’m a longtime green card holder who became a citizen and registered to vote in 2021, so I can attest to this.)
According to a right wing but seems-at-a-glance-not-totally-crazy Kansas web site, Mr. Ceballos is a Republican. And I see no motive for them to make that up. Scroll down in here to see what look like real county voter registration records:
Other than people who know Jose/Joe Ceballos, virtually no one is defending him. I’m an outlier.
To me, indicting with the maximum charges possible, when all that was needed was to tell him not to vote anymore, is much worse than grandstanding.
I don’t defend non-citizen voting. You were right not to vote, in U.S. elections, before naturalization. But it is a totally non-violent crime – almost certainly victimless in that it does not realistically change election results – and it can be effectively addressed without ruining lives.
I wonder if Ceballos was told, when he registered in 2003, that it would be technically illegal but was never enforced in middle-of-nowhere Kansas. If so, we will not know, because it is no legal excuse and would, in our Kris Kobach world, finger a kindly soul as accessory to a felony.
If guilty as charged, he did something really dumb but pretty darn harmless.The worst you can say is the insult at the end here, and it is not a reason to throw everyone who it applies to into the penitentiary:
Thinking about the post immediately above: If we give the people of such towns a little slack, a few will actually figure out for themselves it’s safe to vote against MAGA.