An Ohio Republican who serves as a Porter Township trustee has now “admitted to forging his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot and then voting again as himself,” a report from NBC says. Porter Township, where Edward Snodgrass — the individual in question — serves as a local official, is in Delaware County, Ohio, and an election worker in the county “questioned” the signature that had been submitted with his late father’s ballot, NBC says. The ballot, it turns out, had been sent out the day after Snodgrass’s father passed away, confirming that the signature submitted with it was not legitimate.
It’s not immediately clear which candidate the fraudulent ballot supported, but the Republican affiliation certainly strongly suggests Trump. Snodgrass characterized his actions to NBC as “an honest error,” explaining that he’d been “signing for” his father for a period of time prior to his death due to Parkinson’s disease on the deceased’s part. Snodgrass possessed a power of attorney for his father as his disease progressed, he adds. As he put it, the case isn’t “just Trump voter fraud,” and he added as follows discussing the fraudulent ballot:
‘It was there with a pile of other paperwork. I was sleep-deprived and not thinking clearly. But I’m not going to run away from it… I was simply trying to execute a dying man’s wishes.’
On July 9, Snodgrass “is expected to plead guilty to a reduced charge of falsification and receive a sentence of three days in jail and a $500 fine,” the new report from NBC explains. Originally, Snodgrass faced a charge of illegal voting, which is a fourth-degree felony, but the charge was reduced concurrent to his acceptance of the plea deal. The illegal voting charge carried a potential prison sentence of six or more months. Notably, Republicans around the country have continuously pushed the false claim that there was systematic fraud in last year’s presidential election, which they say swung the race to Biden — but the only real evidence of fraud that has emerged connects to one-off incidents, repeatedly involving Republicans like Snodgrass.
