Kim Phuong Taylor holds a Bible while her husband is sworn in as Woodbury County Supervisor, Dec 2020
WOODBURY COUNTY, Iowa — The wife of a (R) Woodbury County Board of Supervisors member has been arrested and charged in a voter fraud scheme in the 2020 primary and general elections.
49-year-old Kim Phuong Taylor has been charged by indictment with 26 counts of providing false information in registering and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 counts of fraudulent voting. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each of the 52 counts. She made her first court appearance Thursday.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice news release, Taylor allegedly perpetrated a scheme to generate votes in the primary election in June 2020, when her husband, (R) Jeremy Taylor, was an unsuccessful candidate for Iowa’s 4th U.S. Congressional District, and subsequently in the 2020 general election, when her husband was a successful candidate for Woodbury County’sBoard of Supervisors.
According to the indictment, Kim Taylor, whom Jeremy Taylor met while teaching in Vietnam, approached Sioux City residents with Vietnamese backgrounds who had limited ability to read and understand English and offered to help them vote. Prior to both elections in 2020, she helped those people fill out voter registration forms or filled them out herself and submitted them to the county auditor’s office.
Kim Taylor also is accused of signing absentee ballot request forms for residents who were not present or told residents they could sign the forms for other family members, a violation of a registration affidavit in which applicants swear they are the person named on the form.
The indictment says Kim Taylor visited numerous households in the Vietnamese community to encourage them to fill out their absentee ballots, in some cases filling out the ballot and signing the accompanying affidavits for people who were not present or telling family members they could sign on their behalf. Taylor then delivered the ballots to the auditor’s office, “… causing the casting of votes in the names of residents who had no knowledge of and had not consented to the casting of their ballots,” the indictment said.
