Kansas officials have now reportedly charged the mayor of a small town with voting illegally in multiple elections, renewing debate over the integrity of the state’s voter rolls and the challenges of enforcing citizenship requirements at the ballot box.
Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach and Secretary of State Scott Schwab announced six felony charges against Coldwater Mayor Joe Ceballos, a legal permanent resident from Mexico who they say cast ballots in three elections between 2022 and 2024.
The charges, filed in Comanche County, include perjury and voting while ineligible — crimes that could carry more than five years in prison if convicted.
Ceballos, a former city council member, was reelected mayor on Tuesday, though the results have yet to be certified. Under state law, local elected officials must be U.S. citizens. While simply holding office without citizenship is not a crime, Kobach said Ceballos will likely be removed from his position.
“Our system right now is based on trust,” Kobach said. “Trust that when the person signs the registration or signs the pollbooks 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.”
The case, Kobach said, highlights persistent vulnerabilities in the voting system — especially when it comes to detecting ballots cast by non-citizens. “It is not something that happens once in a decade,” he said. “It is something that happens fairly frequently.”
Ceballos’ arrest comes amid broader concerns among Republicans nationwide about the adequacy of voter verification procedures and the potential for non-citizens to influence election outcomes. Kobach, who has long made election security a priority, has argued that even isolated instances of illegal voting undermine public confidence in elections.
Academic research has also suggested that non-citizen participation may be more common than election officials acknowledge. Studies have estimated that illegal votes by non-citizens — who often lean Democratic — may have been cast in sufficient numbers to affect outcomes in closely divided races, including providing Democrats the critical 60th Senate vote during the Obama administration that allowed passage of major legislative priorities such as health care reform.
Kansas has recently stepped up efforts to identify ineligible voters by cross-referencing its rolls with federal immigration databases. “We now have tools, thanks to the current White House, that we haven’t had in over 10 years,” Schwab said. “We can check through the SAVE program to find out if folks end up on our voter rolls.”
Kobach and Schwab both said the new tools would make it easier to prevent similar cases in the future. For now, the Ceballos prosecution serves as a high-profile example of what Kansas officials describe as a systemic issue — one that, they argue, demands continued vigilance to ensure that only American citizens are making decisions at the ballot box.
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