JD Vance’s half-brother is facing scrutiny over whether he committed voter fraud.
Cory Bowman, who shares a biological father with the vice-president but grew up entirely estranged from the older politician, appears to have used a different address for his voter registration than where he claims to live, according to Ohio newsletter The Rooster. Electoral fraud is, of course, the very thing MAGA has been accusing the left of for years.
Bowman, 36, is running as an extremely long-shot Republican candidate for the mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio.
But when he tweeted that he voted early for his own mayoral race at the Hamilton County Board of Elections on October 7, he raised questions over his voter records.
Ohio’s Secretary of State office lists Bowman and his wife, Jordan, as both being registered to vote at an address in the College Hill neighborhood of Cincinnati—6039 Oakwood Avenue—an address that Hamilton County Auditor records show Bowman still owns.
However, the auditing records list Bowman as having a different mailing address—an apartment on West 4th Street in downtown Cincinnati, in the Central Business District.
Neither address is in Cincinnati’s West End—a primarily low-income, Black community—where Bowman does not have a registered address, but has publicly claimed to live multiple times.
On August 29, he tweeted that “hatred and racism” are dividing Cincinnati, writing: “I see it in my home on the West End.”
Another X user posted a screenshot of his tweet, adding “wait, when did cory move to the west end??”
Bowman replied on their thread: “Right after the primary,” which was on May 6—the same day Vance tweeted his support of his half-brother.
During a Republican town hall focused on the West End with Vivek Ramaswamy, Bowman reiterated that he lived in the West End with his wife and four children, even claiming that they have adjusted to the violence in the neighborhood.
“We hear the gunshots,” he said. “We hear the sirens and we’ve been desensitized to ‘oh, this is just how things are,’” Bowman said. “Well, let me tell you, this isn’t how things are meant to be and this isn’t how things should be in the future.”
The legal issue lies in the fact that Bowman’s listed address for voting and taxes does not match his public sentiments of where he lives. So if Bowman does live in the West End, but is voting with his old address in Oakwood, he would be voting in a different county judicial district and committing voter fraud.
To avoid committing voter fraud, when Bowman voted on October 7 he would have needed to vote provisionally—a process made for voters whose eligibility can not immediately be determined on Election Day.
Bowman did not immediately respond to the Beast’s questions on if he voted provisionally. The White House and Vance did not respond immediately to the Daily Beast’s request for comment either.
Vance, who has a 5-bed, 4.5 bath Cincinnati home in an affluent neighborhood, did not know his half-brother for many of their formative years. Bowman and Vance share the same father, Donald Bowman, whom Vance was initially named after when he was born James Donald Bowman in 1984. However, Donald Bowman left the family when Vance was a toddler.
When Vance’s mom, Beverly, remarried, she re-named the future vice president James David Hamel when he was about six—choosing to erase her ex’s name from her son’s. When Vance was 13, he wanted to meet his father and the two younger half-siblings he now had as Donald Bowman had moved on, seemingly quickly as Cory Bowman is only five years younger than Vance.
Cory Bowman previously said that the two grew closer over time. Vance would go on to change his name again, opting to take the last name Vance after his maternal grandmother who raised him as his mother struggled with addiction.
Nowadays, outside of running for mayor, Bowman runs a coffee shop called Kings Arms Coffee, which has gotten him in trouble with the law before. Records show that Bowman got into tax trouble over his coffee shop from early 2024 to early 2025. During that time period, the Ohio Department of Taxation filed 10 consecutive judgments of past due sales taxes against Kings Arms Coffee Cincinnati LLC, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Bowman also founded The River Church with his wife, where he serves as a pastor. The River Church, a nondenominational Christian church, teaches beliefs like the Rapture, the second coming of Christ and notes that followers can prove their devotion by “speaking in tongues.”
Bowman’s potential Cincinnati voter fraud comes after years of false arguments from the far right that voter fraud was the reason Trump lost the 2020 election—claims Trump himself still spurs on and stands by. Vance also claimed that Trump didn’t lose the 2020 election “by the words that I would use,” opting to cite a different conspiracy theory about big tech companies’ supposed interference as his reasoning.
Although there isn’t proof of evidence tampering that Trump claims occurred in 2020, there have been instances of Republicans committing voter fraud.
Earlier this month, voter registration records revealed that Jack Posobiec, Turning Point USA host and MAGA conspiracy theorist who has loudly spread the false claims of voter fraud, had been voting in swing-state Pennsylvania while living in Maryland for nearly a decade.
In February, congressman and Trump ally Byron Donalds was accused of committing the Republicans’ definition of voter fraud after having another member cast a vote for him so he could go on Bill Maher’s show.
In 2023, Alabama Republican Rep. David Cole was arrested for felony voter fraud after voting in a district he didn’t reside in. That same year, the wife of a Republican Iowa county supervisor was found guilty on 52 counts of voter fraud as she attempted to illegally vote for her husband’s U.S. House of Representatives run.
