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Oh, Republicans and electoral fraud. The party’s selfish obsession to exclude specific Americans from the country’s democratic system because someone, somewhere out there could Having the brilliant idea of committing a crime has always been a man of the political bag. But every now and then, without a sense of irony, some power-hungry, rule-averse Republican politician comes along and agrees! This time we have Republican Rep. Steve Watkins of Kansas for the first time, who was charged Tuesday with three offenses related to Watkins’ rather curious voter registration in which he claimed that his home address was a Topeka UPS store. The Watkins campaign said it was a mistake, but the district attorney disagreed, accusing the congressman of various felonies for voting without qualification, illegal early voting, providing false information and interference with the police.
Watkins’ backstory is nebulous, sparking a big surprise during his first run for office in 2018 when he won a crowded Republican primary with 26 percent of the vote. Until then, Watkins was a longtime Alaska resident before appearing on the carpet in Kansas to run for office. Watkins has family connections to the state; He left Kansas after high school, and after twenty years elsewhere, Watkins said the state “was always in my heart.” Watkins’ other home was Alaska, where he owns two condos, purchased in 2005 and 2015, and, according to the Anchorage Daily News, where he “applied 11 times between 2002 and 2015 for the Alaska Permanent Fund dividend, a payment to those who have lived in the state for a full year and say they intend to stay indefinitely. ” The Kansas residence was rented on his 2018 voter registration allowing him to run for Congress.
Watkins’ unexpected candidacy in 2018 was largely funded by a political action committee created by his father and by his own personal money, a setup that contributed more than $ 1 million to the election effort and is now facing Federal Election Scrutiny from the commission. It seems that Watkins has always trusted, say, the positive side of the truth. Yes, he was a veteran, but then he spent many more years as a military contractor. In the election campaign, Watkins said he started and grew his own business, a defense contractor company, but it turned out that he only worked for one. He climbed mountains and competed in races, but there was always an element of bravado in the count.
Watkins’ haze continued once in office. In late 2019, after having obtained a limited victory to become an American congressman, Watkins changed his voter registration before the Topeka municipal elections in November. His new voter registry listed a building that housed a UPS store as his address, changing his vote to a different district on the city council that would later be decided by just 13 votes. It looks like a lot of potential fraud for a city council election that he wasn’t even involved in. Watkins changed his residence in August, applied for a ballot by mail in October, and then voted before the November race, before Later, he changed his home address to a rental apartment in Topeka.
The Topeka Capital-Journal perhaps best summarized Watkins’ residential life in an investigation on the subject in December, concluding: “It is not clear where the congressman physically resided in Kansas after August or in which Topeka compound he was legally qualified to be. part of when I vote in November. “That’s not really a big sign, nothing really. Why all the housing antics then? Here’s the best potential, if not the correct, answer from the Kansas City Star, which reports that some in the state believe that “Watkins was living with the parents at the time, but used UPS’s address to hide that fact.”
