[ConservativeBrief] A Democrat city councilman and five others have been charged with election fraud in California.
Compton City Councilman Isaac Galvan and Compton City Council candidate Jace Dawson worked together in order to help Galvan keep his district and Dawson was charged with attempting to bribe a registrar as she was counting votes on election night, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Isaac Galvan, 34, was one of six people charged Friday with conspiracy to commit election fraud, according to a criminal complaint filed by the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
Prosecutors allege Galvan conspired with Jace Dawson, one of his opponents in an April primary for Galvan’s council seat, to direct voters from outside the council district to cast ballots for Galvan in a June runoff, the complaint states.
At least three improper ballots were counted in the runoff election, ultimately swinging the race, according to the complaint. Galvan raked in 855 votes while Andre Spicer, a Compton native and entrepreneur, tallied 854 ballots in a June runoff election, records show.
Prosecutors also charged Dawson, Kimberly Chaouch, Toni Sanae Morris, Barry Kirk Reed and Reginald Orlando Streeter with two counts each of conspiracy to commit election fraud. Chaouch, Morris, Reed and Streeter all voted in the primary or runoff for the Compton City Council’s second district, despite not living there.
The pair were arrested on Friday and brought into a downtown courtroom in handcuffs as they both pleaded not guilty and were released on their own recognizance.
This is the second time Los Angeles County prosecutors have discovered attempts to manipulate mail-in voting in the 2020 election.
Spicer said he had suspected fraud and his concerns were validated when a woman told his staff that she had committed voter fraud.
“They asked her what do you mean? And she said … she registered to vote from his house and she knows about 20 other people who did the same thing,” he said.
“I can take a loss, but I can’t take being cheated. I don’t like what that does for democracy. It contradicts what I advocate for,” he said. “To hear this happening. I don’t even have the words.”
In November, two men were arrested charged with an attempt to register around 8,000 “fictitious, nonexistent or deceased” voters for mail-in ballots in the Hawthorne mayoral election, The Times reported.
Carlos Antonio De Bourbon Montenegro, 53, and Marcos Raul Arevalo, 34, were charged with multiple counts of voter fraud after allegedly trying to register 8,000 “fictitious, nonexistent or deceased” voters to receive mail-in ballots. The scheme was part of an illicit bid by Montenegro to become mayor of Hawthorne, according to a criminal complaint made public Tuesday.
Montenegro and Arevalo allegedly used three recently registered post office boxes and Montenegro’s home address to submit the fraudulent applications, which allowed election officials to quickly flag them as suspicious in mid-October, according to Dean Logan, the county’s top election official.
While court records show at least 29 mail-in ballots were issued to people Montenegro and Arevalo had allegedly ginned up, none of the ballots were tallied in the general election, Logan said. 
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