Top Election Official Convicted for Creating Fake Names to Order and Send Absentee Ballots
Editor’s Note: Our readers responded strongly to this story when it originally ran; we’re reposting it here in case you missed it.
Kimberly Zapata was a Wisconsin elections official who was fed up with Republicans talking about how easy it was to commit voter fraud. So, she decided to illegally send three ballots to a GOP state representative to, um, shut her up.
On March 20, Zapata was found guilty of election fraud, despite her claimed motivations. Boy, she sure showed them.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the jury took roughly five hours to find the 47-year-old Zapata, formerly the Milwaukee Election Commission deputy director, of one felony charge of misconduct in public office and three misdemeanors for making false statements to obtain absentee ballots.
Boy, she sure showed us. She’ll be sentenced on May 2.
Zapata, who worked for the commission for seven years, was fired just days before the 2022 midterms after it emerged that she had sent the military ballots to the home of GOP state Rep. Janel Brantdjen.
Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said at the time she had admitted to the scheme.
“This has every appearance of being an egregious and blatant violation of trust,” Johnson said, according to WITI-TV. “I was stunned, absolutely stunned, to hear the very serious allegations against her.”
When the case went to trial, Zapata’s defense was that she sent the ballots to Brandjen “because she knew she would not cast the ballots and because of her history with election fraud claims,” the Journal Sentinel reported.
“She is the most vocal election fraud politician that I know of, and I thought that maybe this would make her stop and think and redirect her focus away from these outrageous conspiracy theories to something that’s actually real,” Zapata said in a police interview played for the court.
“I did not think it through,” she added . “I didn’t have some manipulative plan.”
Her defense? Breaking the law in this way was part of acting in her official capacity as an election official.
The Washington Post reported that Zapata had been “frustrated” by what she saw as “meritless issues” regarding election integrity and “wanted to alert them to what she viewed as a true vulnerability in Wisconsin’s voting system. To do that, she has said, she generated three ballots under the names of fictitious military members and sent them to one of the legislature’s leading election deniers.”
She added that she had initially had a “glimmer of hope” that the clerks who received the request would flag the requests for fraudulent ballots as suspicious and not issue them.
“That’s not how it unfolded, however, and all three military absentee ballots were sent to Brandtjen’s Menomonee Falls home,” the Journal Sentinel reported. The state rep reported the ballots to the police.
Prosecutors weren’t having it.
“The appropriate way to raise a concern is to bring forth information, it’s not to commit a crime,” Assistant District Attorney Matthew Westphal told the jury.
“If Ms. Zapata felt this information needed to be brought to light, there was multiple, legitimate avenues she could have taken. She chose instead to take the avenue of breaking the law.”
BREAKING REPORT: ⚠️ Deputy director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission Kimberly Zapata who was FIRED FOR COMMITTING ELECTION FRAUD, FOUND GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS against her after illegally requesting military ballots..
Zapata chose not to testify in her defense.… pic.twitter.com/iVXt011KD0
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) March 21, 2024
“This was not acting as a guardian of our elections, a guardian of our democracy,” Westphal added. “This was her deserting her duty to protect and secure our elections.”
Well, I mean, she is a Democrat.
Now, keep in mind that no illegal votes were cast — if just because the ballots were sent to the home of one of Wisconsin’s top election integrity hawks. And what did this prove? That, if it weren’t sent to her home, three military ballots could have been illegally submitted.
Zapata is right on one thing: No, she definitely didn’t think this one through. Her case proves that voter fraud, should you wish to commit it, is easy enough to pull off and virtually impossible to detect or prosecute if you know the levers of the system to pull.
And rest assured, politicos do.
Yet, Democrats mock those who sound the alarm and then sally forth — at least in Zapata’s case — to prove there are holes in a system they want to make more lax, not more tamper-proof.
If this is a hack that a top election official can easily take advantage of, imagine what those who look to do this on a larger scale might be able to accomplish.
But, no, our elections are more safe and secure than ever — unless a politico commits an obvious crime to try to own a critic and ends up getting caught out of her own stupidity. Are we really supposed to believe this piffle?
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