A Las Vegas executive is facing two charges of election fraud in connection with the 2020 elections, the attorney general said on Thursday.
Donald Kirk Hartle, 55, has faced crime for having voted more than once in the same election and voting on someone else’s name.
“Election fraud is rare, but when it happens it undermines trust in our electoral system and my office will not tolerate it,” Attorney General Aaron Ford said in a statement. “I want to stress that our office will investigate all credible allegations of election fraud and work to bring all criminals to justice.”
Both charges carry a possible prison sentence of up to four years and a fine of up to $ 5,000.
Hartle, the CFO of the Ahern corporate family, is accused of choosing Rosemarie Hartle under the name of his wife who died in 2017.
David Chesnoff, Hartle’s attorney, said his client was looking forward to responding to the allegations in court.
The state began investigating an allegation last year that a vote was cast on behalf of Rosemarie Hartle. The handwriting on her ballot was on Clark County’s records, a district spokesman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in November.
Many Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, made unsubstantiated claims of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 Nevada election.
The case of the Rosemarie Hartle vote was highlighted by the Nevada Republican Party at the time.
“Kirk was surprised to find that his late wife, Rosemarie, a Republican, cast her vote in this year’s election despite passing away 17 ‘,” the party tweeted. “The media need to understand that we can find specific cases of voter irregularities that they need to uncover.”
Don Ahern, the head of the Ahern corporate family, is the GOP’s CFO and a supporter of the former president. Two of its companies were fined last year for hosting Trump events that defied state-imposed measures to combat the pandemic.
A lawyer from the Ahern family could not be reached to comment.
Contact Blake Apgar at bapgar@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5298. Follow @blakeapgar on Twitter.
