High-Profile Republican Arrested Over Criminal Voter Fraud

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New Jersey resident Frederick Gattuso, who ran for mayor of the borough of Carteret, New Jersey, in 2018, has been arrested and charged with voter fraud after authorities discovered that he voted twice in the November election. He voted fraudulently via submitting ballots under the registrations of two people with “similar names,” according to a report from New Jersey radio station WKXW. Gattuso, who has a court appearance scheduled for March 3, ran as a Republican against Democratic incumbent Dan Reiman for Carteret’s mayorship, suggesting that his fraudulent votes in the 2020 election may have been in support of Donald Trump.

As summarized by WKXW, the “campaign between Reiman and Gattuso was contentious with the Republican accusing the incumbent of being a sexual predator, thief and drunk driver,” and in response, Mayor Reiman filed several defamation lawsuits, including one against Gattuso. Reiman said that he felt as though Gattuso’s fraudulent voting was in line with his past behavior, commenting as follows:

‘We exposed his criminal history, his racist and bigoted comments when he ran against me in 2018 so it’s really no surprise that his criminal conduct would continue. The local Republican leaders should condemn voter fraud and these illegal tactics, but as they endorsed him to run for mayor I can’t help but think that this latest stunt was the idea of some of the the same individuals and maybe more wide spread.

Reiman added the following:

‘While it should be easy to participate in our democratic voting process, there needs to be a better system of checks and balances to ensure that the actions of few bad actors don’t undermine the integrity of our voting process and elections.’

The New Jersey Republican Party didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from WKXW — otherwise known as New Jersey 101.5 — according to the station. In the original 2018 match-up between Gattuso and Reiman, the latter got a little over 4 and a half times as many votes as his Republican challenger. Across the country as a whole, in the wake of the 2020 presidential election, then-President Trump and his observers attempted to convince observers that nationwide election-rigging handed victory to Biden, but no court anywhere in the country ever accepted this idea.