They Knew Where They Lived
How two Cabell County women allegedly filed to run in the wrong commission district, refused to leave the ballot, sued taxpayers for their trouble, and now face a revived criminal case.
When Jan Hite King and Kimberly Maynard filed their candidate paperwork in February 2022 to run for the Cabell County Commission, they each swore under oath that they lived in Magisterial District 1. The Secretary of State’s office would later determine that King actually lived in District 2 and Maynard in District 3. What followed over the next three years was a cascade of refusals, a federal lawsuit against county taxpayers, a grand jury indictment, a dismissal, and finally a ruling from West Virginia’s highest court that has now cleared the way for a criminal trial.
On April 7, 2026, the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals issued a writ of prohibition in State v. Young, No. 25-371, reversing the circuit court’s dismissal of the indictment against King and Maynard. The 4-1 majority, authored by Chief Justice Bunn, held that election law violations are governed by a five-year statute of limitations under West Virginia Code Section 3-9-24, not the one-year general misdemeanor clock the circuit court had applied. The ruling is a significant precedent, establishing that West Virginia’s Election Code carries its own, longer window for prosecution and that the state’s long-standing one-year misdemeanor limitations period does not override it for election-specific offenses.
Justice Trump dissented alone, arguing the lower court had not committed the kind of clear legal error that would justify the extraordinary remedy of a writ of prohibition.
For King and Maynard, the decision means their case returns to criminal court. The indictment charges each woman with one count of false swearing and one count of aiding and abetting the other to commit false swearing, all misdemeanors under the Election Code. A fifth count, misdemeanor conspiracy under the general criminal code, was conceded by the State as time-barred and is not being revived. The alleged offense at the heart of the remaining charges: knowingly certifying District 1 residency while living elsewhere.
They Were in the Room
According to Cabell County Commissioner Kelli Sobonya, who detailed the history in a public social media post, the story begins not with the 2022 filing but with a redistricting meeting held years earlier, when the County Commission redrew its magisterial district boundaries as required every decade following the census.
King and Maynard were both present at that meeting. They spoke.
“The two attended the meeting when the County Commission was doing their part as every governmental body does every 10 years to adjust the boundaries based upon population shifts,” Sobonya wrote. “The new map that was adopted was on full display at the meeting they attended. They even spoke out against the map that was adopted (on recording) and thus was aware of the district lines.”
That recorded testimony, Sobonya contends, eliminates any credible claim of ignorance about district lines when the women later filed their candidate papers.
West Virginia Code Section 7-1-1 governs the structure of county commissions and limits representation from any single magisterial district. The geographic residency requirement is not a technicality. It exists, as Sobonya noted, to ensure that no single district dominates the county commission. King and Maynard, if they lived in Districts 2 and 3, were not eligible to seek a District 1 seat in 2022. According to Sobonya, they filed to run against incumbent Commissioner Jim Morgan despite being ineligible under the residency rules.
The Smoking Gun: Two Different Filings
Perhaps the most damaging detail in Sobonya’s account is not the redistricting meeting attendance but a discrepancy in the women’s own filings. In addition to running for the Cabell County Commission, both King and Maynard filed to run for their county Republican executive committee positions. According to Sobonya, those executive committee filings were based on voting precincts that were entirely different from the precinct they used when filing for the commission race.
“Ironically, they both filed to run for the county Republican executive committee where the voting precincts were totally different from their filing for commission,” Sobonya wrote, “thus evidence that they were filing for commission in the wrong district.”
In other words, the argument goes, King and Maynard knew precisely where they lived when it suited the filing at hand and chose to file in a different district for the commission race. Prosecutors are expected to present that discrepancy as evidence of intent.
Warnings Ignored
The Secretary of State’s investigation surfaced the residency problem before ballots were printed. Sobonya says the former Cabell County Clerk gave both women what she described as “ample time” to voluntarily withdraw from the race. The deadline was pegged to ballot printing, which creates a hard cutoff after which removal becomes far more complicated.
King and Maynard refused to withdraw.
“They were given ample time by the former clerk to remove themselves from the ballot since they were ineligible,” Sobonya said. “They were told if they did not take themselves off the ballot by a certain time (before the ballots were printed), which was a violation of election law, that they would be recommended for prosecution.”
When the deadline passed without action from either woman, the bipartisan ballot commissioners intervened and removed them from the ballot. The matter was referred for prosecution.
The Federal Lawsuit
What happened next drew Sobonya’s sharpest criticism. Rather than accepting removal from the ballot, King and Maynard filed civil lawsuits in Cabell County circuit court in 2023, alleging their constitutional rights had been violated and arguing that the residency statute itself was discriminatory. Those cases were removed to federal court and dismissed in 2024.
“They subsequently sued the county commission (taxpayers) civilly alleging pain and suffering and loss of enjoyment in life that went before a federal judge,” Sobonya wrote. “It was subsequently dismissed, but cost the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars not to mention clogging up our federal courts frivolously.”
The cost to Cabell County taxpayers was not vague: the county paid more than $38,000 in legal fees defending against the suits, according to prior reporting by the West Virginia Record. King and Maynard could not be reached for comment.
The Indictment, the Dismissal, and the Writ
A Cabell County grand jury indicted King and Maynard on April 7, 2025, nearly three years after the alleged offenses. The indictment came in at more than one year but less than five years from the February 2022 filing date. That timing put the case directly in the crosshairs of the statute of limitations conflict the circuit court would later have to resolve.
The circuit court, with Judge James Young sitting by special assignment from Wayne County, dismissed the indictment. The court reasoned that because West Virginia Code Section 61-11-9 had been amended more recently than the Election Code’s five-year provision, the one-year general misdemeanor clock governed and the prosecution was too late.
The State, represented by Attorney General John McCuskey’s office, sought a writ of prohibition from the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s Answer
Chief Justice Bunn’s majority opinion rejected the circuit court’s analysis on multiple grounds. The core holding is straightforward: when two statutes address the same conduct and one is general while the other is specific, the specific statute controls, regardless of which was amended more recently. The Election Code’s five-year window at Section 3-9-24 speaks specifically to “any crime or offense under any provision of this chapter,” and the Legislature populated Chapter 3 with both felonies and misdemeanors. There is no ambiguity about its application to misdemeanor election offenses.
The majority found that the circuit court had manufactured a conflict between the statutes where none existed, then reached for a last-in-time tiebreaker it was not entitled to use. The court held that applying the general misdemeanor limitations period to dismiss an Election Code prosecution effectively repealed Section 3-9-24 by implication, a result West Virginia law disfavors and the facts of this case did not require.
Justice Trump’s dissent offered a methodical counter-argument rooted in legislative history. Trump traced the Election Code’s limitations period back to 1908, through the comprehensive 1963 rewrite, and into the 1978 amendment that changed the window from one year to five. The dissent’s position: the Legislature knows how to write “notwithstanding any provision of this code to the contrary” language when it wants one statute to override another, pointing to similar provisions in the Tax Code, the Environmental Protection statutes, and the Bribery and Corrupt Practices Act. Section 3-9-24 contains no such language. Trump argued the circuit court’s decision was at worst a reasonable reading of genuinely ambiguous law, not the kind of clear error that would warrant the extraordinary remedy of prohibition.
The majority prevailed four to one. The writ was granted. The indictment stands.
What Comes Next
With the writ issued, the case returns to circuit court for trial. King and Maynard have not been convicted of anything. They are entitled to the presumption of innocence, and the legal question now shifts from statutes of limitations to whether the State can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that each woman knowingly filed a false statement when she certified her District 1 residency.
The prosecution could point to the redistricting meeting, the recorded objections to the new map, and the discrepancy between the commission filing precinct and the Republican executive committee filing precinct. Sobonya frames those facts as evidence of knowing intent. Whether they are sufficient for a conviction is a question for a jury.
Sobonya, for her part, offered a preview of how the case will be framed for the public.
“The Supreme Court recently ruled that the criminal case would move forward to criminal court,” she wrote. “Stay tuned.”
King and Maynard did not respond to requests for comment. Their attorneys, if retained for the criminal matter, had not entered public appearances as of publication.
The WV WASP is a West Virginia political news, satire, and commentary outlet. Follow us on X: @wvwasp | wvwasp.com 🐝