A GOP county elections commissioner in New York will plead guilty to federal voting fraud charges, the Albany Times Union reported on Wednesday, December 28, 2022 (read story here).
The FBI arrested Jason T. Schofield (photo, left), 42, in September for using “at least eight voters’ personal information to obtain and file absentee ballots during last year’s primary and general elections,” Newsweek said (see story here). More details are here.
The Times Union said Schofield’s guilty plea will be the second conviction in a “wide-ranging investigation” of illegal ballot-harvesting in “elections over the past two years’ that includes “the use of county resources and employees to gather absentee ballots.”
The New York Post reported in December 2021 that a local resident’s tires were slashed after he told the Times Union that ballots submitted for him and his wife by a GOP operative had forged signatures and were “phony” (read that story here).
The county elections department (website here) is overseen by a Democratic and a Republican commissioner. The GOP-majority county legislature reappointed Schofield to the $89,000-a-year job after his arrest, but he resigned after changing his plea from not guilty to guilty.