Republican presidential candidate, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Mich., holds a news conference to announce a Social Security reform bill he is introducing in the House on Sept. 12, 2011 on Capitol Hill. (AP)

Last year, I started a blog supporting the longest of long shot presidential candidates. This man, for whom I held deep respect, resigned after it was revealed that he had been elected primarily due to election fraud.

Thaddeus McCotter, a five-term congressman from Detroit, was best known for his self-deprecating wit and very expansive vocabulary. He was also quite knowledgeable on policy and political theory, and his ill-fated presidential run reflected this quite well.

Shortly after I started the blog, another girl who had been supporting him joined on to write with me. His campaign contacted me within my first thirty website views, and I was quickly granted an online interview with him. He even sent me a copy of his book Seize Freedom (an incredible work of philosophy, policy and wit, very much worth reading if you get the chance), signed “Thank you, Tucker!”

I was beginning to feel pretty important. I had started the blog on a whim late one night, and suddenly I was closely involved with a presidential campaign. Many of his top staffers added me on Facebook, which further fed my ego.

One of his staffers offered me an official job on the campaign in late September. I willfully accepted, feeling at the top of the world as I now was working on a presidential campaign, quixotic as it may be.

The very next day, I heard via Twitter that he had ended his campaign, just over two months after it started.

Congressman McCotter stayed out of the news for most of the next year, but resurfaced in May when it was announced that he had somehow failed to turn in enough signatures to get on the primary ballot of his House race. As he was an incumbent who had done this five times before, this was certainly curious. He had decided to run as a write in candidate instead, which isn’t unheard of.

And then, the real news broke. McCotter failed to qualify for the ballot because the signatures on his petition were fraudulent. With this news, he dropped his write in bid and resigned from Congress.

The man I had supported for president just a year earlier had just resigned from Congress under suspicion of election fraud. This broke my heart. Perhaps this is how John Edwards supporters felt.

With my faith shaken, in early August the attorney general of Michigan announced the results of his investigation into the charges of fraud. He found McCotter was innocent of fraud, but very much guilty of terrible judgment. This was a small relief, but several of his staffers face several years in prison for their actions. Thankfully, none of the ones I knew were among those charged.

But the real kicker was this: McCotter’s staff had fraudulently submitted signatures in each of the three previous elections. Five of his nine years in the House were the result of fraud.

Election fraud is very real, and can have pretty severe consequences. Fraud went undetected for three consecutive campaign seasons, allowing some unscrupulous staffers to skate by, fraudulently reelecting a clearly lazy and unorganized congressman.

Devastated as I was by the charges, I still proudly have two “Thaddeus McCotter 2012” bumper stickers (one on my car, and one on my laptop), and I stand by his 2012 campaign and my position on it. That even the people I respect and admire the most in Congress can be so corrupted reinforces that, as McCotter said in his resignation letter, it truly is a “promotion… from public servant to sovereign citizen.”

Keene is a junior majoring in political science, economics and public policy.