NEW YORK
Real estate developer found guilty of trying to rig an election by falsely registering voters and paying bribes for voters will be sentenced in September, according to officials.
Kenneth Nakdimen, 64, plead guilty in federal court to conspiracy to corrupt the electoral process involving an election in Bloomingburg, New York, officials announced last week.
He is facing up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on Sept. 9, according to officials.
Nakdimen had reached a deal with prosecutors to serve 6-12 months in prison and pay a fine in the range of $2,000-$20,000 in exchange for his guilty plea, according to the Times Herald newspaper.
Nakdimen apologized to the court for his conduct, the newspaper reported.
Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim stated: “Fair elections are the bedrock of democracy.
Kenneth Nakdimen admitted that he devised a scheme to advance his real estate project by falsely registering voters and corrupting this sacred process, according to Kim.
We will not allow greed to influence elections at any level,” said Kim.
According to the allegations contained in the Indictment, as well as court filings and proceedings, this is what happened:
Starting in 2006, Nakdimen sought to build and sell real estate in Bloomingburg, New York.
From these real estate development projects, Nakdimen and others hoped for and anticipated making hundreds of millions of dollars.
But by late 2013, the first of their real estate developments had met local opposition, and still remained under construction and uninhabitable.
When met with resistance, rather than seek to advance their real estate development project through legitimate means, Nakdimen and others instead decided to corrupt the democratic electoral process in Bloomingburg.
They falsely registered voters and paid bribes for voters who would help elect public officials favorable to their project.
Specifically, in advance of an election in March 2014 for Mayor of Bloomingburg and other local officials, Nakdimen and others, and people working on their behalf, developed and worked on a plan to falsely register numerous people who were not entitled to register and vote in Bloomingburg because they actually lived elsewhere.
Those people included some who never intended to live in Bloomingburg, some who had never kept a home in Bloomingburg, and indeed, some who had never set foot in Bloomingburg in their lives.
Nakdimen and others took steps to cover up their scheme to register voters who did not actually live in Bloomingburg by, among other things, creating and back-dating false leases and placing items like toothbrushes and toothpaste in unoccupied apartments to make it seem as if the falsely registered voters lived there.
Nakdimen and others also bribed potential voters by offering payments, subsidies, and other items of value to get non-residents of Bloomingburg to register unlawfully and vote there, according to officials