The state of Maryland has finally removed from its voter rolls a Guyanese citizen who grabbed national headlines last year for scamming multiple school systems into hiring him as a high-level administrator.
State officials removed Ian Andre Roberts on June 2, days after he was sentenced to two years in federal prison for gun possession and lying about his citizenship to secure an Iowa superintendent position.
Maryland officials previously resisted calls to purge Roberts from the rolls, refusing to confirm he was the individual at the center of the national controversy. The state’s recent actions, however, indicate it now acknowledges the match.
The state’s voter file on Roberts now includes the federal court judgment sentencing him to prison for gun possession and false citizenship claims.
The Washington Times obtained access to the documents under an open-records request filed with the Maryland State Board of Elections.
The records show that the board resisted removing Roberts for months, even after his arrest in September and his guilty plea in January. In September, the board issued a statement refusing to confirm that he was the man who appeared on the state’s voter rolls.
At the time, Elections Administrator Jared DeMarinis warned against “improper cancellation,” suggesting he was more worried about booting eligible voters than cleansing the rolls of invalid voters.
The Board of Elections did not respond to a request for comment.
State Delegate Matt Morgan, St. Mary’s County Republican, called Roberts “the perfect symbol of everything wrong with the Maryland State Board of Elections.”
Roberts managed to register twice despite lacking legal status, and remained on the rolls long after moving away a decade ago, said Mr. Morgan, a founding member of the Maryland Freedom Caucus, a group of conservatives in the House of Delegates.
The state regularly sent him absentee ballots in the mail, Mr. Morgan said. There is no record of what happened to those ballots in the state’s voter file for Roberts.
“It practically took an act of God to get him removed from the rolls,” Mr. Morgan told The Times. “The board has sent a loud and clear message to illegitimate voters: Maryland’s elections are ripe for fraud.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Roberts on Sept. 26 in Iowa, where he was serving as superintendent of public schools in Des Moines. He obtained that job by lying about his legal status.
When ICE officers closed in on him as he drove a Des Moines-issued vehicle, he fled on foot. Officers found a loaded gun in the vehicle and, after chasing down Roberts, searched his residence and found more guns.
Illegal immigrants are generally barred from possessing guns.
Roberts had previously been hired as a principal in schools in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and as an administrator and superintendent in Pennsylvania, in St. Louis and in California, despite lacking legal status during those tenures.
The Pennsylvania and Iowa school systems, the last two on his resume, blamed outside contractors for failing to spot his unlawful status.
Maryland elections officials rely on would-be voters to self-report their citizenship when they register.
“Maryland isn’t serious about keeping foreigners off Maryland voter rolls. Even when they find them, they fail,” said Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which advocates for clean voter rolls.
Roberts, who had been in the country without legal status for decades, first registered to vote in Hyattsville in December 2011 and was added to the rolls in January 2012. He checked the box indicating he was a citizen and signed under penalty of perjury, affirming that he was a citizen, even though he had never attained U.S. citizenship.
His voter status was moved to inactive in 2014 and was listed as canceled in 2016 because of inactivity. Yet he re-registered that year, this time filing an electronic application using a Greenbelt address, where he again asserted citizenship. He was returned to the rolls in 2017.
Maryland records do not indicate that Roberts ever cast a ballot.
Mr. Morgan said the Roberts case should spur Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, legislation backed by President Trump that would require proof of citizenship and mandatory voter ID to register and vote in national elections.
Voting rights groups say noncitizen voters are relatively rare.
The Trump administration, though, has prosecuted this year more than a dozen cases of noncitizens who the Department of Justice says not only managed to register but also cast ballots.
Those cases generally involve legal permanent residents who registered under their own names or illegal immigrants who registered under stolen identities of U.S. citizens.
Roberts’ case — an illegal immigrant registering under his own name — is relatively rare, according to a Washington Times analysis of more than 80 cases from the past decade.
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