The Staten Island District Attorney’s office has expanded its election fraud probe of a City Council candidate accused of running an illegal ballot-harvesting and forgery operation to see whether he used similar tactics in his failed campaign last year to win a state Assembly seat, The Post has learned.
Investigators from DA Michael McMahon’s office swarmed the Board of Elections’ borough office several times in the past week to pull a bevy of absentee-ballot applications and other documents filed by campaign workers for Marko Kepi, a US Marine running in the June 22 Republican primary for the seat representing the borough’s Mid-Island section, sources said.
However, the documents weren’t only for this year’s primary. They included similar records filed during Kepi’s failed 2020 primary bid for the 64th District Assembly seat representing parts of Staten Island and southern Brooklyn, which he lost to Republican Michael Tannousis.
As The Post exclusively reported last week, McMahon’s probe was spurred by evidence provided by David Carr, Kepi’s opponent in the race to replace term-limited Councilman Steven Matteo, which included allegedly forged voter-registration forms in a dead man’s name.
Carr, who is Matteo’s chief of staff, said Friday he’s also provided investigators with evidence he believes shows Kepi schemed to secure a second absentee ballot for Kepi under the name of another dead person. A Post review of that paperwork shows the second man died at the age of 67 last December, yet a Kepi worker turned in a voter registration form signed last month by someone claiming to be the man.
Kepi, a former staffer for ex-state Sen. Martin Golden (D-Brooklyn), did not return messages, but has previously denied any wrongdoing and accused Carr of being “desperate.”
McMahon said in a statement that his office “takes these allegations very seriously, and will fully investigate this matter to ensure the integrity and fairness of our election system.”