The long and drawn out election fraud case of former Rep. Gabrielle LeDoux was punctuated by yet another court date on Feb. 13, at which the trial call was set for April 11.
LeDoux is accused of committing voter misconduct and unlawful interference with voting in a case that goes back to at least 2018.
LeDoux, an Anchorage Republican who represented the former District 15 (JBER-Muldoon, now District 18), along with her aide Lisa Vaught Simpson and Caden Vaught, all face various charges relating to LeDoux’s 2018 House race. Simpson had been LeDoux’s chief of staff in the Legislature and sometimes was her roommate in Juneau. Caden Vaught is Lisa’s grown son.
The charges began with an investigation started in 2018 after the Division of Elections identified irregularities in some of the absentee ballot applications and absentee ballots returned for the primary election. Essentially, the three were supposedly getting people who didn’t live in the district to vote in the district. LeDoux may have also falsified ballots by voting for people who were no longer in the district.
LeDoux and the others are accused of “knowingly solicited or encouraged, directly or indirectly, a registered voter who is no longer qualified to vote.” The allegations are class C felonies, which carry up to five years in prison.
Some of those irregularities included 17 people having voted from the same address — a tiny Muldoon trailer, and several votes cast by people who were, apparently, dead.
And then there was the death of Charlie Chang, a Hmong-American hired by LeDoux to help turn out the vote in the Hmong community in the district. Chang left the state after the election, and died shortly after LeDoux visited him in California; she said he died of stress.
In the end, the Division of Elections said that 26 irregular absentee ballots were cast for LeDoux, who ended up winning against Republican challenger Aaron Weaver by 87 votes in 2018.
The original charges included similar actions she also took during the 2014 election, but those charges were dropped due to the statute of limitations having run out on them.
The case has had numerous hearings and cancelled hearings, and there’s no guarantee that this coming April’s scheduled trial call will result in a trial. A trial call is the court event when the judge asks both prosecutor and defendant’s lawyers if they are ready to go to trial. After that, typically a date is set for jury selection.
LeDoux has pleaded not guilty and called the charges “fake news.” She ran hard in 2020, but lost in the primary against Republican David Nelson. The district lines have since been redrawn and much of that district is now owned by Democrats, with Rep. Cliff Groh representing a large portion of it, now known as District 18.
Justice has not been swift. In March 2020, LeDoux and the others were charged. A grand jury indicted them in 2021. There have beenfive “trial setting conferences,” before Tuesday’s conference, and two previous trial calls — and no trial since the offenses originally took place in 2018.
