NEW YORK
Real estate developer Shalom Lamm plead guilty in federal court Tuesday to conspiracy to rig an election in Bloomingburg, New York, according to officials.
Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim said: “As he has now admitted, Shalom Lamm conspired to advance his real estate development project by corrupting the democratic process, specifically by falsely registering voters. The integrity of our electoral process must be inviolate at every level; our democracy depends on it.”
Lamm, 57, of Bloomingburg, New York, pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to corrupt the electoral process. He is facing up to five years in prison.
Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 28, according to officials.
According to the allegations, this is what happened:
Starting in 2006, Lamm sought to build and sell real estate in Bloomingburg, New York. From these real estate development projects, Lamm 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, Lamm and others instead decided to corrupt the democratic electoral process by falsely registering voters and paying 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, Lamm 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 some who had never set foot in Bloomingburg in their lives.
Lamm and others took steps to cover up their scheme 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.