By Jason Alatidd, Topeka Capital-Journal, 11/11/25

A case of a noncitizen accused of illegally voting in Kansas elections has two Republican state officials believing they will find more — perhaps hundreds or thousands more.

“Noncitizen voting is a real problem,” said Attorney General Kris Kobach. “It is not something that happens, you know, once in a decade. It is something that happens fairly frequently.”

Kobach and Secretary of State Scott Schwab believe newly shared federal immigration status data will help clean the state’s voter rolls. It is not publicly known whether the data was used to identify the criminal case announced last week.

Jose “Joe” Ceballos, age 54, of Coldwater, was charged with six election crimes on Nov. 4, the same day he was reelected as town mayor.

In a press conference the next day, Kobach and Schwab publicly announced the charges against Ceballos, who “is a legal permanent resident of the United States and a citizen of Mexico.” The charges, all of which are felonies, are three counts of voting without being qualified and three counts of election perjury. They were filed in Comanche County District Court.

“Voters should be aware that both the attorney general and the secretary of state are determined to do everything we can to prevent the illegal voting in Kansas,” Kobach said. “And by illegal voting, I mean voting by someone who is not a U.S. citizen, regardless of their immigration status. I would also mention that, every time a noncitizen votes, it effectively cancels out the vote of a U.S. citizen.”

In his two terms as secretary of state, Schwab, who is now running for governor, has maintained that Kansas elections are secure. He still believes so.

“Overwhelmingly, our elections are secure,” Schwab said. “But I’ve said it for seven years. We look at election security sort of like we look at cybersecurity. You could win today, but then you find out something new, and then you got to find another way to make it better.”

Kansas officials tout SAVE system

President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to provide state election officials with data from Social Security and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system, or SAVE.

Schwab has said the Social Security data will help identify deceased voters in registration databases while the SAVE data will help remove noncitizens.

SAVE is a federal program intended to help government agencies confirm citizenship and immigration status. It is administered by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Did SAVE program identify case of noncitizen voting in Kansas?

Schwab declined to tell reporters whether the SAVE system identified Ceballos as a noncitizen voter.

“We’re not going to talk about that,” he said. “That’s the investigation side.”

Kobach also declined to discuss how this one case was identified.

“The specifics of how we came to the knowledge came to know that this individual is on the voter rolls and voting we’re not at liberty to talk about right now,” Kobach said. “That’s part of the investigation in the case.”

Why Kansas is using SAVE system to clean voter rolls

“One of the reasons that those individuals have remained on our voter rolls is because you can’t simply look at the voter rolls and say that person’s a citizen, that person is not a citizen,” Kobach said. “The only way you can discover that a noncitizen is on the voter rolls is if some sort of external information comes to light which indicates that that person is not a U.S. citizen.”

That will change now because of the SAVE data.

“On the policy side, we now have tools, thanks to the current White House, that we haven’t had for over 10 years,” Schwab said. “We can check through the SAVE program to find out if folks end up on our voter rolls. They could be a legal resident but they’re not a citizen, and we want to make sure that gets clarified. If they voted, that it’s a crime.

“We have run that system. We’re currently verifying. We don’t want any false positives.”

Speaking of the SAVE system, Schwab said Kobach should “be prepared to be busy as we go through these and find out potential positives of people who are non-U.S. citizens that have voted.”

Schwab said he was “surprised this happens.”

“I was never really a big believer this happens,” Schwab said. “I always came from the angle of let’s prove it’s not happening — and then we get the data. It’s important we clean this up.”

How will Kansas use the SAVE system?

Kobach said the process of using the SAVE system will start with the Secretary of State’s Office, which will “determine probable instances of noncitizens on the rolls.” That office will then go through the data, deduplicate and ensure “that it’s not a false positive.”

Schwab said, “We’re going over 10 years’ worth of data or more, and so it’s a process.” He expects to have a verifiable number of noncitizens on the voter rolls, separated into those who never voted and those who did, which he will turn over to Kobach.

“I don’t know how large the number is going to be,” Kobach said. “My early indications are that it’s a very large number.”

Once the Attorney General’s Office receives that information, Kobach said, “There will be all kinds of questions.” He said there may be multiple violations of different laws.

“We will have to see this big pile of evidence and then decide which cases to prosecute,” Kobach said.

“Know our hearts here, this is not to take illegal voters off the voter rolls,” Schwab added. “This is people that everyone would agree we would have facts to justify before a court that these people should not be on the voter rolls and they committed a crime. This is not a witch hunt. This is just us doing what the Legislature’s told us to do.”

Kansas AG expects SAVE will ID hundreds if not thousands of noncitizens voting

While Kobach said his “large number” reference meant hundreds, he believes “it’s going to be more likely in the thousands.”

He cited a past legal battle over a 2011 proof of citizenship law he championed that was struck down by courts.

“The expert witness provided by the state testified that it is likely there are thousands of noncitizens on our voter rolls in Kansas today,” Kobach said.

Schwab predicted it will be in the hundreds.

“I thought when we would do this we might find three or four — and it’s going to be closer to hundreds,” Schwab said. “Now is that enough dispersed-wise that it would change the outcome of an election? I don’t know. But I will say, if you broke the law knowingly and willingly, we’re going to hand it over to the attorney general.

“I was shocked. I’ve been in this office for seven years. I didn’t have this tool, but I’m just like, it can’t be really that many. We disagreed on this,” Schwab said, referring to himself and Kobach, who was his predecessor. “And then we get the data, and it’s a whole new story.”

Federal judge gave ‘no weight’ to previous claim of thousands

U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson struck down the law as unconstitutional in 2018. That decision was affirmed by an appeals court, which said the law “undisputedly has disenfranchised approximately 30,000 would-be Kansas voters.”

“The Court determines that the magnitude of potentially disenfranchised voters impacted by the (documentary proof of citizenship) law and its enforcement scheme cannot be justified by the scant evidence of noncitizen voter fraud before and after the law was passed, by the need to ensure the voter rolls are accurate, or by the State’s interest in promoting public confidence in elections,” Robinson said in her 2018 ruling.

Robinson was highly critical of the witnesses offered by Kobach and their testimony. She ultimately gave “no weight” to various estimates alleging there were thousands of noncitizens on the voter rolls.

“Defendant insists that these numbers are just ‘the tip of the iceberg,’” Robinson said of Kobach’s description of 30 incidents of noncitizen registration in Sedgwick County. “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so. The Court will not rely on extrapolated numbers from tiny sample sizes and otherwise flawed data.”

Robinson said “the more obvious conclusion” is “there is no iceberg; only an icicle, largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

Additionally, Robinson encouraged using the SAVE system but suggested the Secretary of State’s Office under Kobach had not fully attempted to do so.

That was also the case where Robinson ordered Kobach to take six hours of continuing legal education as a sanction for “flaunting disclosure and discovery rules.”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Kobach remains convinced that “if it had, it would have been a different outcome.”

Kobach said if the Supreme Court upholds a similar proof of citizenship law in Arizona, then “it would be appropriate … for Kansas then to revive its law.”

Ceballos was one of 2 million registered voters

The most recent election that Ceballos, the Coldwater mayor, is charged with voting illegally in the August 2024 primary. His vote was one of 336,139 votes cast that election, which had about 17% voter turnout of the nearly 2 million registered voters.

Kobach said the political left will argue that whether the number of illegal votes is in the hundreds or the thousands, “as a percentage of total votes cast, it’s not very large.”

But Kobach said that argument is a red herring. He pointed to elections with a close margin where a handful of votes could decide the race, and “then it does potentially affect an outcome.”

“But I would argue that even when it doesn’t affect an outcome, it still effectively takes the vote away or cancels the vote of a U.S. citizen,” he said.

“Now that we have these new tools available to actually look at the vote rolls, it’s not a tiny number, and when you have a close election, even a small number can tip the scales,” Kobach said.

Schwab agreed with a statement that 1,000 or 2,000 noncitizens out of 2 million registered voters would be “pretty clean” voter rolls.

“But the goal is to get better,” Schwab said. “And now we have tools to get better. Let’s say we don’t have that many. Let’s say we’re wrong, we come back, it was 80.

“Well now we have voter confidence because it was only 80, and we were able to find it. If we find out it’s 2,000, well now we need voter confidence because now we’re going back and cleaning it up. Either way, it’s a win-win.”

Could it have been a misunderstanding?

Kobach declined to say how long Ceballos has been registered to vote but said it is public information, and “he has been registered to vote prior to these charges.” KWCH-TV in Wichita reported that Ceballos has been a registered voter since 1990.

Kobach said the requirement to show your ID when voting would not have prevented this case because it is possible to have a Kansas driver’s license without being a citizen. That is the case with “many temporary aliens and permanent lawful aliens,” he said.

Kobach said the case has “unassailable evidence.”

Ceballos is accused of illegally voting in three elections. Kobach declined to say whether there were other elections in which he voted.

“As an attorney in the case overseeing the prosecution, I’m not going to talk about whether he may have violated the law prior to what we alleged in the complaint,” he said.

Kobach was asked whether there could have been some kind of misunderstanding where Ceballos wrongly believed he could vote and didn’t intend to break the law.

“I can’t comment on that question with respect to this case,” Kobach said. “But … it probably doesn’t matter at the end of the day. If the individual did commit the crime, whatever excuses an individual may have probably aren’t going to be relevant to whether the crime was actually committed.”

Schwab acknowledged that there could have been a mistake — and not necessarily by Ceballos himself — that led to him wrongly being registered to vote.

“If someone’s on the voter rolls, sometimes when they register to vote, they check ‘I’m not a U.S. citizen’ and then clerical error puts them on the rolls,” Schwab said. “Because the person doing the data input isn’t checking that, because eventually it becomes robotic when you’re coming to the filing deadline and you’re processing all this paper.

“And oftentimes, when they’re on the rolls and they’re trying to become citizens, there’s ways to say, ‘Well, are you a citizen yet?’ And that’s an important question to ask them, because if they are a citizen now, we want to make sure, OK, then we’ve got bad data.

“So it’s not just going after people and looking for crimes. It’s also helping people be put in the right place of where they belong. And it’s about also showing the people of Kansas we are doing what we can to make sure you guys know our voter rolls are as clean as we can. But we’re using every tool we have access to. We have more now than we ever have before.”

Kobach said those kinds of mistakes could have been prevented by the proof of citizenship law that was struck down.

“One of the benefits of the 2011 law on proof of citizenship is that it would have prevented individuals from accidentally or in ignorance of the law becoming registered as noncitizens,” Kobach said. “It prevents people who aren’t sure whether they are entitled to vote or not from getting on the voter rolls.”