Former Elections Commissioner Pleads Guilty to Ballot Fraud, Faces Decades in Prison
A former Rensselaer County, New York, elections commissioner pleaded guilty Wednesday for fraudulently applying for 12 absentee ballots for 2021 elections with voters’ names and birth dates, the Northern New York U.S. Attorney’s Office announced.
Jason Schofield, 43, confessed to personally possessing nine of the absentee ballots to make Rensselaer County Board of Elections records wrongly show they had been mailed to the voters, the office said. Schofield, a Republican, resigned from the board on Dec. 28, WRGB reported.
“Schofield admitted that for each application, he falsely certified that he was the voter requesting the ballot,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release. “He also admitted that he took personal possession of 9 of these ballots, while knowing and intending that RCBOE records would falsely reflect that the ballots had been mailed to the voters.”
Schofield could receive up to five years in prison and a maximum $250,000 fine for each of the 12 counts in his indictment, with sentencing set for May 12, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s press release.
A majority of Rensselaer County Legislature Republicans and Democrats voted to re-elect Schofield in December to a second term as Republican election commissioner despite his September FBI arrest, according to WRGB.
Dissenting Democratic County Legislature Minority Leader Peter Grimm decried the re-election, arguing, “Politics came before governance. The people of Troy have been robbed, they’ve been robbed of their rights, of their will of their choices, and it’s been proven.”
A representative at the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for further comment.
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