The wife of a currently serving county Republican official in Iowa was arrested on Thursday — and reportedly later released — for her responsibility in a sweeping voter fraud scheme in the 2020 primaries and general election targeting residents of Sioux City who speak Vietnamese.
The defendant is Kim Phuong Taylor, whose husband Jeremy Taylor ran unsuccessfully in a Republican Congressional primary held in 2020 and later prevailed in a general election contest over a county supervisor post. Federal prosecutors allege that she personally approached local residents ostensibly to encourage absentee voting. She signed affidavits that generally accompany absentee ballots and voter registration forms without permission from those whose names she was using and claimed to others they could sign for someone who wasn’t there at the time. In reality, Iowa rules required the signature be provided only by the individual voter. She is now facing dozens of criminal charges — 52 in total — and is facing a trial that was scheduled for this upcoming March.
According to the Justice Department, she faces up to five years in prison on each count if eventually found guilty. It is unclear her actions would have been enough to change the outcome of an election. Although it’s not as though it’s a race per ballot, Taylor is charged with 23 counts of fraudulent voting, evidently indicating prosecutors found nearly two dozen individual cases in which it appeared she shepherded the submission of fraudulent votes, but her husband won the race for that county post by nearly 2,000 votes overall.
Woodbury County Auditor and election commissioner Pat Gill said this week that local authorities were eventually contacted by someone whose information was used for the deceptively cast ballots. Gill evidently got in touch with both state authorities and the FBI to provide some of the information he received. The Sioux City Journal specifies that federal investigative details recently made available indicate Taylor targeted residents with limited abilities to understand English. Neither the Journal nor the Justice Department press release specify the contents of the fraudulently submitted votes.
The case mirrors an unfolding situation on the Atlantic coast of the state of New York, where Jason T. Schofield, a GOP elections commissioner in Rensselaer County, was charged over the fraudulent submission of votes. Like Taylor (not the GOP official but his wife), Schofield personally visited local residents whose information he used for those deceptively cast votes and got them to put pen to page. In that case too, Schofield was also involved in fraudulent requests for absentee ballots, some of which he later took to those he targeted for their signature. Schofield committed his acts in local elections held in 2021, and it was recently announced he would be pleading guilty and resigning his position as a local elections commissioner. Despite Trump’s insistence on spreading baseless allegations of imaginary fraud, following the revelation of these actual (isolated) instances of misconduct it’s unclear the former president has made a single public reference to either case.
