The wife of an Iowa politician was sentenced on April 1 to eight months after she was convicted on over 50 counts of election fraud in an unsuccessful attempt to get her husband elected to Congress in 2020, the Associated Press reported.
Kim Taylor was convicted on 52 counts of voter fraud last November. According to prosecutors, Taylor, who is from Vietnam, approached Vietnamese voters who spoke little English and illegally filled out ballots for them, failing to translate the warnings that they could not vote for members of her family. She then forged signatures on the affidavits for them and their English-speaking children.
The scheme was aimed at helping her husband Jeremy Taylor, a former state House Rep., to win Iowa’s Republican primary to run for the 4th congressional district in 2020. Taylor finished a distant third in the primary. He ultimately ran for and won a seat on the Woodbury County Board of Supervisors in November 2020.
Following her conviction, Taylor’s attorney filed a motion to dismiss the verdict but the judge rejected the motion.
While none of the witnesses in her trial testified to seeing Taylor sign any of the documents, her presence in each home at the time the forms were filled out linked her to the fraudulent votes.
KTIV in Sioux City reported that Taylor will only serve four months behind bars. The other four months will be spent in home confinement. Once she is released from jail, Taylor will have two years of supervised release. She was also ordered to pay $5,200.
Judge Leonard Strand said while sentencing guidelines called for 18 to 24 months, he did not believe it was justified in Taylor’s case.
The judge explained that there were things about the case that concerned him, especially “the way the arrest was carried out.” He said prosecutors could have contacted Taylor’s attorney to arrange for her to surrender to authorities instead of surveilling her home and deploying a “strike team” to arrest her.
The judge said the lower sentence was justified due to Taylor’s lack of criminal record and her work in the community. He noted that she was unlikely to re-offend since, as a convicted felon, she would not be able to vote.
Jeremy Taylor was not charged in the case but was named an unindicted co-conspirator.
