Coldwater, Kan. — Joe Ceballos has been winning elections in this tiny ranching town for more than a decade, securing his second mayoral term in a landslide earlier this month.

But Ceballos’s version of the American dream - a Mexican immigrant who became an integral part of a close-knit Kansas community - has run smack into a newer American phenomenon: the aggressive prosecution of alleged voter fraud by noncitizens.

Ceballos, who has a green card, came to Coldwater as a teenaged ranch hand. When he turned 18, a teacher at his high school took him to the county courthouse to register for the draft and to vote, friends of Ceballos and his family said, adding that it was common for teachers in town to do so at that time.

He was hired as a city employee as a young man and, eventually, ran

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