MILLBOURNE, Pa. (WHTM) — A federal judge has sentenced the final co-conspirator in a scheme to steal a mayoral election in Delaware County.

MD Munsur Ali, a member of the Millbourne Borough Council, was sentenced to 21 months in prison, one year of supervised release and a $2,500 special assessment by United States District Judge Harvey Bartle III after pleading guilty to election fraud offenses.

It comes a week after the judge sentenced Md Rafikul Islam, a former councilmember, and Md Nurul Hasan, the vice president of the council, for their role in the scheme.

“These defendants sabotaged the democratic will of their fellow citizens in deciding Millbourne’s next mayor,” said U.S. Attorney David Metcalf.

The charges stemmed out of a plot to steal a 2021 mayoral election in the borough, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, after Hasan lost the Democratic primary election by 18 votes.

The office said the three devised a plan to rig the election when Hasan declared a write-in campaign.

The plan involved a multi-step process to register non-Millbourne voters to vote in the borough for the election that involved:

• Obtaining personal identification information of non-Millbourne residents, such as their names, addresses and dates of birth

• Using the personal identifying information to access the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s online voter registration (PAOVR) website to change the voter registration addresses for those non-Millbourne residents to locations within Millbourne

• Using the PAOVR website to request mail-in or absentee ballots

• Retrieving the ballots from the Millbourne mailboxes

• Impersonating the voters and fraudulently casting write-in votes for Hasan to be mayor

• Enclosing the fraudulently completed ballots in envelopes and forging the voters’ signatures on the envelopes

• Submitting the ballots in their envelopes to the Delaware County Board of Elections.

The office said the three persuaded friends and family to either register in Millbourne or hand over their personal information, insisting they would not get in trouble as long as they did not vote in other elections, so they could register them.

The men registered three-dozen non-Millbourne residents, the office said, and cast ballots in the mayoral election. However, Hasan went on to lose the election anyway by a vote of approximately 165 to 138.

The FBI and the Delaware County District Attorney’s Office investigated the case.