The wife of an Iowa Republican who ran for Congress in 2020 was arrested Thursday and accused of casting 23 fraudulent votes on behalf of her husband.
In an 11-page indictment, prosecutors allege that Kim Phuong Taylor “visited numerous households within the Vietnamese community in Woodbury County,” where she collected absentee ballots for people who were not present at the time. Taylor, who was born in Vietnam, then filled out and cast those ballots herself, the indictment alleges, “causing the casting of votes in the names of residents who had no knowledge of and had not consented to the casting of their ballots.”
Taylor is also accused of signing voter registration forms on behalf of residents who were not present. In all, prosecutors allege, she engaged in 26 counts of providing false information and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 counts of fraudulent voting. Each charge carries a maximum 5-year prison sentence.
Taylor’s strategy? To push her husband, Jeremy Taylor, who ran in the 2020 GOP primary for Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, over the finish line. Sadly, he finished a distant third. He later ran for the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors and won, presumably without the help of his wife.
Of course, there’s a good reason in-person voter fraud is so vanishingly rare: It’s a high-risk, low-reward proposition. Think about it. Who would be foolish enough to risk a five-year prison sentence to cast one, or even several, fraudulent votes that will almost certainly be inconsequential to an election’s outcome—especially when it’s so easy to get caught? Well, Republicans, evidently. And it probably doesn’t help that Trump literally encouraged them to do it.
This kind of thing seems to happen a lot. For instance, a frothing MAGA weirdo named Mark Meadows, who was all-in on Trump’s “stop the steal” nonsense, was caught redhanded claiming—on official voter registration forms—that he lived in a rented mobile home in North Carolina that he’d almost certainly never actually lived in. But somehow, he managed to get away with it.
Of course, while it’s extremely rare to hear about in-person voter fraud—because it hardly ever happens—when you do, it’s invariably one of these pro-Trump white noise machines who’s doing the frauding.
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, maintains a public database of ballot-fraud cases. A review of the database reveals an astonishing fact: In every listed indictment and conviction for voter fraud or other malfeasance in connection with the 2020 presidential general election, when the culprit’s political affiliation is known he or she turns out to be a Republican or “unabashed conservative.”
In May 2021, Arizona indicted Tracy Lee McKay for voting in her dead mother’s name last November. McKay is a registered Republican. “Voter fraud cases are rare,” the Arizona Mirror reported.
Still, there appears to have been a bit of an epidemic of Republican dead mothers voting. In Pennsylvania, Robert Richard Lynn pleaded guilty in August to doing the same thing as McKay with his deceased mother’s ballot in the 2020 presidential election. In May, Bruce Bartman, to borrow poker vernacular, “saw Lynn and raised him one”: He pleaded guilty to registering to vote in both his dead mother’s name and that of his dead mother-in-law.
How about that, huh?
Maybe Republicans have become so convinced that Democrats are stealing every election—except the ones that would give us a workable majority in Congress, apparently—that they feel the need to commit actual crimes to counter our pretend ones.
Or maybe they really are this hypocritical and foolish. Yeah, let’s go with that.
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.
