13 charged in fraud case tied to 2nd District election signature-gathering
Apr 9, 2024, 8:55 AM | Updated: 2:49 pm
The State of Utah Third Judicial District Courts building. A church leader from Taylorsville was charged Thursday with engaging in an illegal relationship with a teenage girl. (Yukai Peng/Deseret News)
(Yukai Peng/Deseret News)
SALT LAKE CITY — Thirteen people were charged Friday with a variety of crimes, including fraud, forgery and improperly collecting election signatures in last year’s special election for the state’s 2nd Congressional District House seat.
The Utah Attorney General’s Office filed multiple indictments in several Utah counties against several people from Utah, Nevada, and Washington, accusing them of participating in a scheme to submit fraudulent voter signatures for an unnamed candidate for office.
The state previously charged Timothy Francis Mooney, 62, of Arizona, with two counts of violation of certificate of nomination procedures, a class A misdemeanor, after prosecutors said he paid signature gatherers improperly. Utah’s election code prohibits paying signature gatherers based directly on the gross number of signatures submitted to a filing official.
The charges don’t specify which candidate the people were allegedly supporting, but candidate Bruce Hough’s campaign manager previously told KSL that Mooney turned in signatures to Hough’s campaign.
Those charges alleged Mooney entered into contracts with two signature gatherers between June 12 and June 14 and agreed to pay one of them “per gross signature gathered if the validity rate of those signatures remained at 80% or greater.”
According to court documents filed Friday, one of those signature gatherers was Daniel Jacob McWilliams, 23, of Layton. McWilliams is charged with communications fraud, two counts of identity fraud and making a false/inconsistent material statement, second-degree felonies; plus forgery, a third-degree felony; and violation of certificate of nomination procedures, a class A misdemeanor.
McWilliams is the sole owner of the company Battleground USA LLC, and entered into a contract with Mooney in June 2023, according to charging documents. He then worked with his business partner and friend Matthew Douglas Imhof, 22, of Vineyard, to lead crews of signature gatherers in several counties contained within the 2nd Congressional District, which stretches from Davis County to Washington County.
Read the full story at KSL.com.
