The benefits you can occur from stealing even a low level elected position are worth far more than a mere 30 months behind bars, assuming this guy even serves the full sentence. He probably stuffed more money into his pockets running this fraud scheme in a year than most people make in decades of 40+ hours a week of hard work. Even small towns routinely toss around millions of dollars on utter nonsense like sidewalks to no where and solar panels to power a flashing red light on a stop sign that 6 people use a week, let alone larger cities.