When a clerk in Comanche County asked a group of students on a field trip whether they wanted to register to vote, Joe Ceballos raised his hand.
It was an act that would set him on a path to being charged with voter fraud more than three decades later.
Ceballos, the twice-elected mayor of Coldwater, Kansas, says he didn’t understand that as a Mexican immigrant he couldn’t vote in the United States.
An honest mistake, he said. But now he’s found himself in legal trouble that threatens to upend the life he’s spent half a century building.
He now faces felony charges for voter fraud, filed by Kris Kobach, the state attorney general.
“I’m scared,” he said. “I’m not sleeping.”
But if a prevailing fear among Republicans concerned about voter fraud is that Democrats are encouraging non-citizens to vote to win elections, Ceballos does not fit that mold.
Ceballos, 54, also thinks he “probably” voted for Kobach all four times Kobach ran for state office. And he thinks he voted three times for President Donald J. Trump, including in the 2020 election. He thinks, rather than knows for sure, his friends say, because of a naivety that probably led to this mess.
What’s worse than Kobach’s charges, he said, is that the Department of Homeland Security is now threatening him with starting that legal process called deportation.
“I haven’t seen Mexico since I was four,” Ceballos said. “I don’t speak Spanish anymore. If I get deported it would wreck my life.”
Ceballos doesn’t contradict much of what Kobach alleges. He came to this country as an undocumented Mexican. He really did vote as a noncitizen. He thought, mistakenly, at the age of 20, that the all-capital-letters — PERMANENT RESIDENT — on his often-renewed federally issued green card made it legal for him to vote.
He’s so popular in Coldwater that voters there have put him on the city council four times, the last two as mayor of that tiny southwest Kansas town. In the November election, he won the Coldwater mayor’s race 121 votes to 20.
Kobach could not be reached for comment. It is typical for prosecutors to not comment on pending cases.
But during the news conference announcing the charges, Kobach argued that if someone commits a crime, their excuses for why they did so aren’t going to be relevant.
Ceballos’ friends are now ticked off. And not at Ceballos.
“If deportation happens, I can tell you that Kobach will have trouble showing up here, especially if he asks to stay with us for a while,” said Dennis Swayze, an 80-year-old Comanche County rancher and a Republican voter. Swayze decades ago took Joe under his wing to hire and mentor him as a mostly penniless but eager calf-roping kid ranch hand. And he says he’s partly to blame for Ceballos’s trouble.
And it’s real trouble. In that news conference on Nov. 5, Kobach said Ceballos could spend as much as five and a half years in prison and pay a $200,000 fine — for voter fraud and election perjury, all felonies.
Ceballos said he now understands that he broke the law — but he and others in his community wonder what’s a fair consequence. The town of 693, in southwest Kansas, might lose their mayor.
After all, as Kobach pointed out: Elected officials in Kansas are required by law to be legal electors — meaning legally registered voters.
The attorney general said the Coldwater City Council might take another look, given that Ceballos just won re-election.
Ryan Swayze, a friend to Ceballos since childhood, says his buddy has been snagged in the nets of a broken and dysfunctional immigration system. There are as many as 87,000-plus people living in Kansas as undocumented immigrants — 55,000 of them fully employed, paying taxes, according to the Pew Research Center. Many of them become part of the fabric of the community, a connection that can be ripped out in the process of enforcing long looked-past laws.
It’s unclear how many non-citizen immigrants, either legal or undocumented, have registered to vote, but Kobach expects to find hundreds of ineligible voters on the rolls.
There’s a relevant twist to all this, and goes to the heart of why his friends think he’s innocent. As said earlier: Ceballos thinks rather than knows he voted for Kobach. (Since ballots are secret, there is no way to know for sure.) Why his uncertainty? Stay tuned. Uncertainty may be the key to how he got into this mess.
Multiple friends in Coldwater say Ceballos’ naivety led to these charges. They all live in a county that voted 80% for Trump last time. They say the only reason their buddy registered to vote, as a 20-year-old who progressed slowly in school, was that he wanted to vote for Republicans. Like all his friends.
Last week, just days after Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post put his situation into national headlines, Ceballos came to Wichita to give his first news interview ever.
“I”m pretty sure I voted for them (Trump and Kobach) because I always voted for all the Republicans.”
But he has always been so disinterested in politics that he never bothered to look at candidate names. Other than to look for the letter “R” beside the names.
If Kobach was looking for a poster child for his push against fraud, Gail Boisseau said, that’s wrong. “If you know Joe, you know Kobach picked the wrong guy.”
She was his special education teacher in school. This mess actually started, she said, when she took Ceballos and her other special education students to the Comanche County clerk’s office on a field trip. And there, she said, she actually played a role — which she now regrets — to get him mistakenly registered as a Kansas voter.
Ceballos is so popular that his defense attorney in Wichita, Jess Hoeme, thinks ‘I can get a jury to come along with me,” in finding him not guilty because he believes he can show Ceballos never intended to commit a crime.
But there’s a larger theme here, Hoeme said. “The real question about this case is what kind of an America we want to hand off to our children.”
“What kind of America is it where government behavior would tear a good man away from his family, his community and his cattle, leaving no one here for them? It’s not the America I grew up in.”
Arrests and deportations, Hoeme said, tear a hole in the web that holds together our economy, our workforce, our food chains and our communities.
Ceballos admits to the naivety his friends mentioned.
The fact is, Ceballos said, his “probable” votes for Kobach were made without him knowing a single thing about Kris Kobach. Including that Kobach has made national headlines many times. Voter fraud has always been one of Kobach’s chief political concerns, even though data suggests voting by undocumented people or ineligible residents is rare.
Ceballos said his voting history is actually even more extensive than Kobach alleges. The attorney general claimed that Ceballos voted fraudulently “several times.” And committed the additional crime of election perjury.
Ceballos said he has voted in every local, state and national election since 1991.
“Voting by noncitizens, including both legal and illegal aliens, is a very real problem,” Kobach said in his written statement on Nov. 5. “It happens. Every time a noncitizen votes, it effectively cancels out a U.S. citizen’s vote.”
And: “This alien committed a felony by voting in American elections,” Homeland Security officials said in a statement on Nov. 13. “If convicted, he will be placed in removal proceedings.”
On paper, the charges against Ceballos look formidable — perhaps impossible to beat, said his lawyer, Hoeme. “He’s clearly not a U.S. citizen. And he did vote, and non-citizens can’t do that.
“But there was no intent here. I’m confident he’ll beat this.”
About deportation, though, “That’s not so clear,” Hoeme said. “And I can’t do much about that.” Homeland Security’s public statement about Ceballos made it contingent — that if he’s found guilty on the state charges, they would start the deportation process. But Hoeme worries that even if a jury finds him not guilty, Homeland might still start that process.
‘He trusted them’
His friend since childhood, Ryan Swayze, said Ceballos is beloved for many reasons — one being that he can be flat out naive about what he doesn’t know. This is why three of his friends say they are partially to blame here.
“He registered in 1991 when he was only 20 because the county clerk told him it was okay,” said Boisseau, his former special education teacher. “He thought they knew what they were doing, so he trusted them, as he trusts everybody. I think I let him down there. I should have pressed things.”
“If I could, I’d make them take me in his place, and I was born right here at the Comanche County Hospital.”
“Deportation would be, as I told Joe, like sending me to Egypt,” said Michael Bushnell, Ceballos’s boss at CMS Electric Cooperative, where Ceballos works as a pole-climbing utility worker. Bushnell says he’s admired Ceballos’s integrity for years. “I don’t know how he can calm his mind now.”
The potential consequences felt very real when Ceballos showed up last week at his lawyer’s Wichita office. He had driven the 127 miles from Coldwater. He wore his gray, billed Harley Davidson cap, jeans and a troubled look on his face.
Ceballos pulled out his most recent federal green card from his wallet and handed it to us. “You see this?” he said. On the top of the card, in large capitalized letters are the words that he says told him voter registration would be okay for him: PERMANENT RESIDENT.
“I thought that made me a citizen.”
About that ‘naivety’
As Boisseau tells it: .
“When he first got to Comanche County, he was barely speaking English, and everything around him was all new. He was way behind in school, which was why he ended up in my (special education) class, sitting with children who were younger.”
Ryan Swayze points a finger in his own family’s direction: “The truth is – and my Dad and I have talked about this — we may be partly to blame for what’s happened. We may have let him down.”
“That’s right,” Dennis Swayze said. “I was the one who drove him to Wichita when he was still a kid, to get him that first green card. He saw those words, ‘permanent resident,’ and thought that made him a citizen, and that was not true. So I partly blame myself. We should have brought this up and said it wasn’t enough. But there’s others who also should have been more on the ball. Where was the county clerk when he raised his hand about registering? The clerk should have asked too.”
Ryan Swayze said Coldwater voters have elected Ceballos four times because “Joe was always the go-to guy in town to get anything done. If the sewer system acted up, they called him. He puts up the town Christmas lights on Main Street. He raises the flags on Veterans and Memorial days.”
Dennis Swayze: “One day, in a cold winter, my diesel truck engine jelled up and wouldn’t start. Joe had told me he’d just built a big heated shed, so I called him. He gave me room to store it, then called me when he got it started. I asked to pay him. The heaters in there don’t pay for themselves. But he said no.”
Ceballos’ naivety about politics stems from one thing, Ryan said. He doesn’t care about politics.
“Most Republicans can at least spell out a simple description of the differences,” he said. “They’ll say that Democrats think the government provides, while Republicans think the government should let us just do our thing. But Joe doesn’t even have that much in mind. Once he knew all his friends voted Republican, that was all he needed to know.”
Politics bores his friend, Ryan Swayze said.
We asked Ceballos about this.
“Yeah,” he said. “If politics comes up in Coldwater, I generally just get up and walk out.”
He says he does know many things.
“I like dove hunting. I used to like deer hunting, until rich people bought all the good hunting land and shut out the rest of us. I like my cows.” (Besides working full time and being mayor, Ceballos owns a 165-acre farm where he manages 35 baby-making cows.)
He knows plenty about the United States, he said. “A few years back, I started a business.” He had a tree trimming and removal business “for years and made a little money. You can make yourself a life here.”
That Tuesday talk in his lawyer’s office was a really bad day, as Ceballos said right there, sitting in one of Hoeme’s office chairs.
It was finally sinking in how bad this might end up becoming, he said.
For now, Ceballos feels at a loss about what to think about America, or anything now. But his friends say they know where he belongs.
“He’s more American than I am,” Ryan Swayze repeated. “I take a lot about what we’ve got here for granted. But he doesn’t take anything about America for granted. He came from nothing and built a life here — a job, a family, a child and a farm, and an appreciation for everything this country gives us.”
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly described a business that Joe Ceballos started. It was a tree trimming and removal business.
This story was shared as part of the Wichita Journalism Collaborative, a coalition of newsrooms — including KMUW — and community partners joining forces to help meet news and information needs in and around Wichita.