An Iowa woman who sought to boost her husband’s unsuccessful congressional bid in 2020 through a voter fraud scheme was sentenced by a federal judge to four months in prison Monday in a rare case of fraudulent voting.
During the 2020 primary and general elections, federal prosecutors said, Taylor filled out voter registrations and absentee ballots for members of the Vietnamese community under the guise of offering translation help. Taylor is of Vietnamese descent, and Iowa prohibits election material, including ballots, from being printed in any language but English.
Prosecutors said Taylor used the ballots to fraudulently generate votes for husband Jeremy Taylor’s unsuccessful bid in the Republican primary for a seat in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District. The month after his primary loss, he successfully ran for Woodbury County Supervisor and still holds the position.
Jeremy Taylor, a former Iowa state legislator, was identified in court documents as an unindicted co-conspirator but was not charged with a crime.
Kim Taylor, who could have faced a maximum sentence of five years in prison per count, must serve four months of home confinement following her prison release plus two years of probation, as well as cover $5,200 in court costs.
“On behalf of Ms. Taylor and her family, we’re pleased with the sentencing result,” defense attorney F. Montgomery Brown told The Washington Post on Wednesday.
Brown had sought a longer home confinement term in lieu of prison and said the court was given “extensive” mitigating background information on Taylor, including “a considerable body of letters of support.”
Chief U.S. District Judge Leonard Strand acknowledged as part of his sentencing decision that Taylor had no prior criminal record and was the primary caretaker to her and her husband’s six children and her elderly mother.
“It does undermine confidence in the voting process,” Strand said of Taylor’s crimes, according to the Sioux City Journal. “Certainly votes were cast that would not have been cast, but for Ms. Taylor’s conduct.”
Eliza Sweren-Becker, senior counsel in the Voting Rights and Elections Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said that in general, instances of fraud related to elections are exceedingly rare, largely because of the strength of voter integrity rules.
“Instances of voter impersonation are rarer than being struck by lightning,” Sweren-Becker told The Post.
In the landscape of voter fraud prosecutions, Sweren-Becker said, it’s also important to note who is being prosecuted and for what offense, citing Florida’s recent spate of arrests of felons who cast ballots amid uncertainty about whether they were qualified to vote.
“One of the things we’ve seen in unjust prosecutions of people in Florida is that they’ve been prosecuted regardless of whether they knew they weren’t allowed to vote,” Sweren-Becker said. “Intent is incredibly important.”
The typical prosecutions the Brennan Center has tracked in recent years do not involve people working on behalf of a candidate but rather ordinary people who made mistakes as they attempted to “sincerely assist voters,” she said.
“Those honest mistakes shouldn’t be the subject of prosecutions,” Sweren-Becker added.
She cited the case of Crystal Mason, a Texas woman whose five-year sentence on a charge of illegally voting in 2016 was overturned by an appeals court last week. Mason, who was on supervised release at the time for a tax fraud conviction, filed a provisional ballot in the 2016 election, unaware she was ineligible. The ballot was not counted.
“Those are the kinds of unfair, unjust prosecutions related to elections that we’ve seen recently and are quite concerning,” Sweren-Becker said.
