Kansas Election Fraud: Watkins, Ceballos, and Crosscheck

Election fraud in Kansas, judged by court findings and prosecution records, has been rare in the modern era and has usually involved individual confusion rather than organized schemes, even as the state has spent more than a decade at the center of national fights over voter fraud policy. The documented cases number in the single digits over multi-year stretches, and the two biggest enforcement programs the state built to catch fraud — a multistate voter-matching database and a proof-of-citizenship registration law — were both shut down after courts and security reviews found serious problems with them.

How Many Proven Cases Are There?

When the Kansas Legislature granted then-Secretary of State Kris Kobach prosecutorial authority over election crimes in 2015, he had cited 18 cases of alleged double voting and 100 cases of alleged voter fraud to make the case for the new power.¹ By mid-2017, he had obtained nine convictions. The Brennan Center for Justice put the figure even lower, at four successful prosecutions out of six brought.²

Reporting on those cases found that most defendants were older voters who did not understand the rules and voted in more than one state where they owned property, or in one case a college student who forgot she had already mailed an absentee ballot in her home state. Only one of the nine people who pleaded guilty was a noncitizen.³ Preston Glen Christensen pleaded guilty in 2017 to a misdemeanor for voting in both Kansas and Texas in the 2012 general election and paid a $1,000 fine.⁴ Lincoln Wilson, a Colorado resident identified through the Crosscheck program, pleaded guilty in 2016 to voting in both Kansas and Colorado in three straight election cycles and was fined $6,000.⁵

Ron Thornburgh, who preceded Kobach as Secretary of State, described voter fraud during his tenure as “very minimal,” saying his office received fewer than five complaints.¹ During the Fish v. Kobach trial, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson summarized the gap between the rhetoric and the record: “The court draws the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”⁶

The Two Highest-Profile Recent Cases

Steve Watkins

In July 2020, sitting U.S. Representative Steve Watkins, a Republican from Kansas’s 2nd District, was charged in Shawnee County with three felonies: illegally voting in a November 2019 Topeka city council race, falsifying his residential address on a voter registration form by listing a UPS Store postal box instead of his parents’ home where he actually lived, and lying to a sheriff’s detective during the investigation.⁷ Watkins lost his House committee assignments and then lost the August 2020 Republican primary to Jake LaTurner three weeks after the charges were announced.⁸ He entered a diversion agreement, acknowledging his earlier claim of not voting was false, accepting a six-month deferral, and paying a $250 fee. If he complied, the charges would be dropped.

Jose Ceballos

On November 5, 2025, Attorney General Kris Kobach announced felony charges against Jose “Joe” Ceballos, the former mayor of Coldwater: three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury, each a nonperson felony carrying a potential sentence of more than five years in prison.⁹ Prosecutors alleged that Ceballos, a Mexican national who has been a legal permanent resident since 1990, voted in the 2022 general election, the 2023 local election, and the 2024 primary despite not being a citizen.¹⁰ The announcement came the day after Ceballos had been re-elected mayor. He later said publicly that he had voted for Donald Trump in 2024 and had believed he was eligible.¹¹

In April 2026, Ceballos reached a plea agreement. The felony counts were reduced to three misdemeanor counts of “disorderly election conduct,” and he received probation, a suspended sentence, and a $2,000 fine. Immigration and Customs Enforcement then ordered him to report to a Wichita facility. He surrendered on May 13, 2026, was transferred to the Chase County Jail, and by early June 2026 had been granted a $3,000 bond in his immigration case while facing possible deportation.¹² Kobach said at the time of charging that he expected “hundreds” of ineligible voters to be found on Kansas rolls and that his office was using the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) database to look for more cases.¹⁰

The Crosscheck Program

The Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program, created in 2005 and run from the Kansas Secretary of State’s office, compared voter rolls across states to flag people potentially registered in more than one. At its peak the database held 109 million registrations from 31 states.¹³ Analyses found Crosscheck produced false positives more than 99 percent of the time, flagging voters with common names who were not actually registered in multiple states.⁶

A data breach then exposed the personal information of 945 Kansas voters. A Department of Homeland Security assessment found Crosscheck did not encrypt data and transmitted passwords by email.¹³ In June 2018, the ACLU of Kansas sued over the security problems. The case settled in December 2019, with the Secretary of State’s office acknowledging that voter information had been “improperly disclosed” and agreeing that Crosscheck would not resume until DHS-recommended security upgrades were in place and participating states accepted expulsion for any negligent disclosure.¹⁴ The program has remained suspended.

The Proof-of-Citizenship Law

In 2013, Kansas enacted the SAFE Act, requiring documentary proof of citizenship such as a birth certificate or passport to register to vote. Between January 2013 and December 2015, more than 31,000 voter registration applications were denied or suspended under the requirement, and evidence at trial showed more than 99 percent of those applicants were citizens who were otherwise eligible.¹⁵

The ACLU, the League of Women Voters of Kansas, and individual voters challenged the law in federal court in February 2016.¹⁶ In June 2018, Judge Robinson struck it down after a full trial. Over a 20-year period in Sedgwick County, which had roughly 130,000 registered voters, fewer than 40 noncitizens had attempted to register and only five had actually voted. The judge found “no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” and concluded the law had disenfranchised “tens of thousands of voters.”³

Judge Robinson dismissed the testimony of Kobach’s main expert witness, Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University, as “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,” noting his data showed a rate of noncitizen registration “not statistically distinct from zero.”³ She also held Kobach in contempt for failing to obey a 2016 order restoring voting privileges to roughly 17,000 suspended voters, and ordered him to complete six hours of legal education.¹⁶ A federal magistrate separately fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voter fraud document he had prepared for President Trump.

The Tenth Circuit affirmed in April 2020, holding the law was preempted by the federal National Voter Registration Act and violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The appeals court found only 39 noncitizens had successfully registered statewide between 1999 and 2013, or 0.002 percent of registered voters.¹⁵

What the Rules Look Like Now

Kansas requires photo identification to vote in person, and the accepted documents range from driver’s licenses and passports to student IDs and concealed carry permits. A voter without ID at the polls may cast a provisional ballot that counts only if identification is provided before the county canvass. Mail-in voters must give a driver’s license number or a copy of a photo ID on their application. A change that took effect in 2026 ended the previous three-day grace period for mail ballots; all mail ballots must now arrive by the close of polls on Election Day.¹⁷

In 2021, Secretary of State Scott Schwab created an Election Security Initiative that includes an online tool for reporting suspected fraud and educational materials on election law.¹⁸ In March 2026, the Legislature passed HB 2437, the SAVE Kansas Act, requiring the Secretary of State to cross-reference voter rolls against the federal SAVE database twice a year, requiring county officials to remove deceased individuals from the rolls once an obituary is published by a funeral home, and restricting official voter registration websites to .gov domains.¹⁹ Governor Laura Kelly vetoed the bill, the Legislature overrode the veto, and it became law on April 9, 2026.²⁰

A second bill from the same session, HB 2569, would have ended no-excuse mail-in voting if any court struck down the state’s signature verification law and would have required all voting rights lawsuits to be filed in Shawnee County District Court. Governor Kelly vetoed it and the House did not move to override, so it did not become law.²¹

A Note on the Territorial Era

Searches on Kansas election fraud sometimes turn up the territorial violence of the 1850s, which was fraud on a scale nothing modern approaches. In March 1855, thousands of Missourians crossed the border to stuff ballot boxes in the territorial legislature election. In Leavenworth, the recorded vote was five times the town’s population, and proslavery candidates took roughly 90 percent of the vote despite antislavery settlers outnumbering proslavery ones.²² The resulting “Bogus Legislature” and the fraudulent 1857 vote on the Lecompton Constitution shaped the slavery crisis nationally; Territorial Governor Robert Walker called the Lecompton outcome “a vile fraud, a bare counterfeit.”²³ Kansas voters rejected Lecompton in August 1858 by 11,300 to 1,788, and the state entered the Union as a free state in January 1861.²⁴ This era has no direct bearing on current Kansas election administration; it belongs to the fight over whether Kansas would be slave or free.

The Pattern Across the Modern Record

Taken together, the court findings, prosecution record, and research point in the same direction. Expert testimony in Fish v. Kobach established that noncitizen registration in Kansas was “not statistically distinct from zero.”³ The proof-of-citizenship requirement blocked more than 35,000 eligible Kansans from registering before it was struck down.⁶ A nonpartisan Government Accountability Office study found the 2011 photo ID law measurably reduced turnout, with the greatest effect on African American voters and newly registered voters.¹ The cases that have been prosecuted, from dual-state property owners to a congressman using a UPS Store address to a small-town mayor who said he thought he was eligible, have overwhelmingly looked like individual mistakes rather than organized efforts to change election outcomes.

1
Brennan Center for Justice. Uncovering Kris Kobach’s Anti-Voting History
2
Brennan Center for Justice. Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth
3
ProPublica. Kris Kobach Voter Fraud Kansas Trial
4
Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Cases. Preston Glen Christensen
5
Heritage Foundation Election Fraud Cases. Lincoln Wilson
6
Kansas Reflector. Voter Fraud Myth Persists Despite Constant Failure to Prove Claims
7
Kansas Reflector. Former Rep. Watkins Cuts Deal to Avoid Prosecution for Felony Election Fraud
8
WIVB. Kansas Rep. Watkins Unseated After Facing Criminal Charges
9
Kansas Secretary of State. Kobach, Schwab Announce Charges in Voter Fraud Case
10
Kansas Reflector. Small-Town Kansas Mayor Charged With Alleged Voter Fraud
11
El País. ICE Arrests Former Kansas Mayor Who Illegally Voted for Trump in the 2024 Election
12
KWCH. Former Coldwater Mayor Convicted of Elections Crimes Granted Bond in Immigration Case
13
KMUW. Security Concerns Stall Kris Kobach’s Controversial Voter Tracking Program in Kansas
14
ACLU of Kansas. ACLU Kansas Settlement Puts Crosscheck Out of Commission for Foreseeable Future
15
Justia. Fish v. Schwab, No. 18-3133
16
ACLU. Fish v. Schwab (Formerly Fish v. Kobach)
17
Kansas Secretary of State. Voter Information
18
Kansas Secretary of State. Election Security
19
Kansas Reflector. Kansas Legislature Passes Package of Elections Bills That Alter Voting Processes
20
Kansas Secretary of State. Secretary Schwab’s Voter Roll Maintenance Bill Becomes Law After Veto Override
21
Kansas Legislature. HB 2569
22
Civil War on the Western Border. Contested Election 1855
23
Truman Library. Buchanan Reading Packet
24
American Battlefield Trust. Lecompton Constitution