Iowa woman guilty of ballot stuffing in husband's congressional race

Photo: Jerry Mennenga/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock Iowa woman guilty of ballot stuffing in husband's race for Congress

Kim Taylor Convicted of Election Fraud in Her Husband's Failed Bid for the 2020 GOP Congressional Candidacy

The wife of a northwest Iowa county supervisor was found guilty of Tuesday in a scheme to tamper with the ballot box in her husband's unsuccessful race for the 2020 Republican nomination for Congress.

The Sioux City Journal reports the jury deliberated for six hours before finding Kim Taylor guilty of 26 counts. of providing false registration and voting information, three counts of registration fraud and 23 counts of voter fraud.

Prosecutors said Taylor, a native of Vietnam, approached numerous voters of Vietnamese descent in a poor manner understand English, and completed and signed election forms and ballots on behalf of them and their English-speaking children.

They said the scheme was designed to help her husband, Jeremy Taylor, a former member of the Iowa House of Representatives who finished third in the race for the Republican nomination for Iowa's 4th District congressional seat. Despite this defeat, he ultimately won election to the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors that fall.

No one testified that Kim Taylor personally signed any documents, but her presence in the home of each voter while filling out the forms was the common thread of the whole affair.

< p class="dcr-1kas69x">Jeremy Taylor, who met his wife while teaching in Vietnam, was not charged but was named an unindicted co-conspirator. The case remains under investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Timmons, one of three prosecutors presenting the federal government's case, said he could not comment on any potential future charges.

Kim Taylor, who remains at large awaiting sentencing, faces up to five years in prison on each charge.

«Now is the time to sympathize with the suffering family,» said her lawyer F .Montgomery Brown. , adding that his goal is to achieve the best outcome at sentencing.

Brown did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press about the case or the couple's reaction.

The Woodbury County Board of Elections became aware of possible voter fraud in September 2020 when two Iowa State University students from Sioux City requested absentee ballots only to learn that ballots had already been cast in their names.

They were allowed to pick up those ballots and vote themselves, but Woodbury County Auditor Pat Gill, who is also the elections commissioner, kept the fraudulent ballots. While processing absentee ballots on election night, election officials notified Gill that the handwriting on some of them appeared similar.

In most cases of voter fraud, one voter casts one ballot. on behalf of another person, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Evans, who helped prosecute Taylor's case.

«Despite what is written in the media, voter fraud is extremely rare,» — said Evans. “When someone voted dozens of times for several people, this is rare.”