The city manager of a tiny Oklahoma town has been arrested and charged with 11 felony counts of voter registration fraud after investigators say she submitted applications using other people’s names and forged their signatures.
Shonda Lou Barnes, city manager for the Town of Mannsville in Johnston County, was taken into custody at her home Monday afternoon on a warrant charging her with 11 counts of false affidavit in voter registration. She was booked into the Johnston County Jail, KXII reported.
The Johnston County Election Board flagged the applications in late May.
The forms had been submitted from the Mannsville area just before the voter registration deadline so the names could vote in the June primary.
Investigators found multiple applications bearing matching signatures that did not belong to the people whose names were on the forms. Authorities then traced those applications to Barnes.
Johnston County Sheriff Gary W. Dodd did not mince words:
“As one of Oklahoma’s 77 constitutionally elected sheriffs, it is our duty and the duty of every Sheriff’s Office in this State to protect the integrity of our elections — one of the most sacred rights of citizens of this country.”
This is not some abstract “voting irregularity.” This is a sitting city official allegedly manufacturing voters by stealing identities and forging signatures so those names could participate in a primary election.
And it is not Barnes’ first tangle with public money and public records.
In 2017, while serving as Mannsville town treasurer, Barnes was charged with felony embezzlement after a state audit found nearly $80,000 in mismanaged funds between 2011 and 2015. Court documents at the time alleged she obtained a state grant under false pretenses.
The same audit documented unauthorized overtime, scrap-metal sales with no deposits, an unauthorized inmate commissary fund, unsupported food purchases, and missing receipts. Her nephew was serving as fire chief during part of that period.
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