A former Rensselaer County, New York, elections commissioner pleaded guilty Wednesday for fraudulently applying for 12 absentee ballots for 2021 elections with voters’ names and birth dates, the Northern New York U.S. Attorney’s Office announced.
Troy’s Jason Schofield, 43, confessed to personally possessing nine of the absentee ballots to make Rensselaer County Board of Elections records wrongly show they had been mailed to the voters, the office said. Schofield, a Republican, resigned from the board on Dec. 28, CBS 6 reported.
TROY, NY – JANUARY 15: A view of Broadway in downtown Troy, New York, where Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and her campaign team have leased building space to set up her 2020 presidential campaign headquarters, January 16, 2019 in Troy, New York. Last night on The Late Show, Gillibrand told host Stephen Colbert that she has formed an exploratory committee for her White House run. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“Schofield admitted that for each application, he falsely certified that he was the voter requesting the ballot,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release. “He also admitted that he took personal possession of 9 of these ballots, while knowing and intending that RCBOE records would falsely reflect that the ballots had been mailed to the voters.”
Schofield could receive up to 5 years in prison and a maximum $250,000 fine for each of the 12 counts in his indictment, with sentencing set for May 12, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s press release. (RELATED: Russian Twitter ‘Disinformation’ Had No ‘Measurable’ Impact On The 2016 Election Results, Study Finds)
A majority of Rensselaer County Legislature Republicans and Democrats voted to re-elect Schofield in December to a second term as Republican election commissioner despite his September FBI arrest, according to CBS 6. Dissenting Democratic County Legislature Minority Leader Peter Grimm decried the reelection, arguing, “Politics came before governance. The people of Troy have been robbed, they’ve been robbed of their rights, of their will of their choices, and it’s been proven.”
A representative at the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for further comment.
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