COVID-19: Kansas woman speaks after death of mother and friend
In 2020, 20 people died from COVID-19 in Gove County, Kansas, a county with just 2,600 residents. Sharon Dubois lost her mother to the virus.
The Kansas Attorney General’s Office has filed criminal charges against the popular and recently re-elected mayor of a small town for allegedly voting despite not being a U.S. citizen.
Attorney General Kris Kobach said Jose “Joe” Ceballos, 54, is a Mexican citizen with legal permanent resident status in the United States, but is not a citizen. Ceballos was re-elected this week as mayor by residents of Coldwater, a community of 687 people in southwestern Kansas.
Kobach said at a news conference Wednesday that Ceballos is charged with three counts each of election perjury and ineligible voting. The charge carries a maximum penalty of 68 months in prison and a $200,000 fine.
A hearing on the charges is scheduled for Dec. 3.
Coldwater City Attorney Skip Heard told Wichita’s KWCH-TV that Ceballos’ green card holder’s application raised “red flags” in his green card application.
“He’s been a registered voter since 1990,” Hurd told the news station. “He applied for citizenship in February of this year, and through that he raised the question of whether he was a legal citizen,” Hurd said.
The state’s charges are based on Ceballos’ votes in the 2022 and 2023 general elections and the 2024 primary, but Kobach said Ceballos was registered to vote before those elections. Ceballos did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but Coldwater City Council President Britt Lennertz issued a statement saying the mayor had convened council members for a special meeting on Wednesday to discuss the situation.
“At this time, our focus remains on ensuring that city operations continue to run smoothly and the needs of our community are met,” Lennertz said. “While the recent allegations regarding the Mayor are understandably concerning, we will allow the appropriate legal process to proceed before making any further comment.”
Lennertz told KWCH that Ceballos, who also served on the City Council, could complete the remaining two months of his current mayoral term, but was informed that he would become mayor after that unless his citizenship was approved by then. She said the situation is difficult for the community that has rallied around the longtime public servant.
“As mayor, he has done a great job,” she told the news outlet. “As a City Council member, he has done a great job. He always puts our community first in everything he does.”
Kobach said Kansas law requires city officials to be qualified electors, as well as U.S. citizens.
“Unpopular voting is a serious problem,” Kobach said. “It doesn’t happen every 10 years,” he said, noting that Kansas is currently the only state in the state to utilize the federal System’s Systematic Alien Eligibility Verification System (SAVE) to verify citizenship status on registered voter rolls. He said Tennessee, Florida and Ohio also use the system.
“The only way a non-citizen could be discovered to be on the voter rolls is if some outside information comes to light indicating that the person is not a U.S. citizen,” he said. “Our current system is based in large part on trust: trust that when a person signs a registration form saying they are eligible to vote or are a U.S. citizen, they are telling the truth. In this case, we allege that Mr. Ceballos violated that trust.”
Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said the system allows state officials to determine whether a registered voter is on the rolls, whether intentionally or due to clerical error.
“If they voted, it’s a crime,” he said. “It’s important that we clean this up.”
Schwab said the effort is not about investigating criminal activity, but about restoring voter trust.
“It’s about showing Kansans that we’re doing everything we can to make sure our voter rolls are as clean as possible,” he said. “This is not a witch hunt.”
He said it would be up to Coldwater city officials to decide whether Ceballos should serve as mayor, “but the law says he should not serve because he is not a legal elector.”
President Donald Trump recently praised Schwab, a Republican running for governor in 2026, for using the SAVE system to “protect the integrity of our elections.”
Kobach said he expects the SAVE system will help states identify “hundreds” of non-citizen voters. He said a vote by a non-citizen effectively invalidates the vote of an American citizen.
“We don’t know how big that number will be, but early indications are that it’s a very large number,” he said. “We need to see and decide who to indict.”
