Federal Voter Fraud Statute Applied to Purely Local Election

A developer who undertook a scheme to stuff the ballot box in a small New York town to elect a mayor who supported building a Hasidic Jewish community there was guilty of federal voter fraud, the Second Circuit said Tuesday.

The federal statute applied to Volvy Smilowitz because New York conducts a unitary voter system for local, state, and federal elections, and his scheme targeted at the purely local Bloomingburg, N.Y., mayoral election had the potential to affect future federal elections, the opinion by Judge John M. Walker Jr. said.

The federal statute reaches voter registrations that pertain to federal ...