Gaea Powell
A loyal supporter of President Donald Trump has been convicted on nine counts of election fraud, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.
Gaea Powell, a Moms for Liberty activist, ran for a county clerk-recorder spot in a small California town, promising that she could improve "election integrity." As the Chronicle reported, "it turns out this conservative candidate wasn’t following election laws herself."
A county jury found Powell guilty of nine felony counts, including lying about her residence, unlawfully registering to vote and fraudulently voting.
It comes from both the 2022 and 2024 elections, when Powell ran for mayor of Arroyo Grande. She claims that she didn't know or attempt to commit fraud.
“I respect the jury’s role. But I am deeply disappointed by today’s verdict,” Powell’s statement said. “I have maintained from the beginning, and I maintain today, that I did not knowingly deceive anyone and did not act with fraudulent intent.”
Powell represented herself in court rather than hire a lawyer. She claimed that there was evidence that could have vindicated her, but that it was "excluded during the trial," the report said.
She claims she'll appeal.
As the report explained, it isn't the first time a conservative candidate who pledged to create strict voting laws has also been found guilty of breaking existing laws.
Trump supporter Tina Peters, a former Colorado clerk, tampered with voting machines and then claimed fraud in the 2020 election. She was commended by President Donald Trump.
Another is Chad Bianco from Riverside County, who was the sheriff at the time and was running for governor when he claimed voter fraud was a huge problem. He then seized hundreds of thousands of ballots. The case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled he broke the law.
The justices even went so far as to write that Bianco exposed the ballots to “alteration or tampering” when he illegally seized them.
The heavily Republican senior community in Florida, The Villages, had a small group of four residents caught voting twice in 2020. They voted in Florida in person and in a previous state by absentee ballot.
The Villages conspiracy made the cases politically notable because reports of their activity came as Trump claimed that Democrats had committed widespread fraud to steal the 2020 election.
In 2020, Republican Donald “Kirk” Hartle voted twice in Nevada: once for himself and again under his late wife's ballot.
A 64-year-old Republican woman even went so far as to use the "everybody does it," excuse when she cast a ballot in her deceased mother’s name in 2020. Reporting said she did so because she believed Democrats were committing widespread fraud.