In the last few years, amid Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election in 2020, several Republicans have admitted to committing some form of voter fraud. These confessions shed some light on why Republicans are so quick to claim voter or election fraud because they are accustomed to committing it.
In the most recent incident of Republican elections confessions, a former Republican county elections commissioner in upstate New York pleaded guilty to federal identity theft charges Wednesday, The New York Times reported.
Identified as Jason Schofield, the former commissioner of the Rensselaer County Board of Elections, resigned last month and admitted in 2021 that he used the personal information of voters in order to apply for a dozen absentee ballot applications. Using the New York State Voter Absentee Ballot Application Request Portal, he used voters’ names and birthdates to electronically request the ballots, federal prosecutors said.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Northern District of New York, Schofield admitted that he or someone working for him sought the ballots from May to October 2021, during elections for county executive, clerk, and legislature and municipal races in the cities of Rensselaer and Troy. At the time, New York State voters could request absentee ballots online because of the pandemic. As a result, he obtained the ballots of those who had no interest in voting.
The indictment noted that, in some instances, Schofield had voters—whose names he had used— sign the envelopes the ballots were returned in without completing the ballots themselves. This allowed him to fill out the ballots and deliver them to the county elections board for processing. He also admitted that he took personal possession of at least nine ballots while knowing and intending that RCBOE records would falsely reflect that the ballots had been mailed to the voters.
According to the Associated Press, while he was originally arraigned in September, his attorney said Schofield maintained he was innocent of the charges in the 12-count indictment. Schofield is scheduled to be sentenced on May 12 and faces up to five years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, and supervised release of up to three years for each count.
Schofield is the second public official in Rensselaer County within the last year to admit to engaging in ballot fraud, The Times reported. Last year, Kimberly Ashe-McPherson, a former member of the Troy City Council, pleaded guilty to a federal identity theft charge after being accused of casting three absentee ballots using names other than her own in 2021. She, too, resigned after entering a plea deal, and currently awaits sentencing.