posted October 30, 2014 11:47 PM            

October 22, 2014 10:26 AM
James O’Keefe Strikes Again
The guerilla filmmaker has exposed how voter fraud is both easy and condoned in Colorado.
John Fund

Many liberals are adamant there is no threat of voter fraud that justifies efforts to improve the integrity of elections. “There is no real concrete evidence of voter fraud,” tweeted Donna Brazile, former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, this week. “It’s a big ass lie.”

James O’Keefe, the guerilla filmmaker who brought down the ACORN voter-registration fraudsters in 2010 and forced the resignation of NPR executives, politely disagrees. Today, he is releasing some new undercover footage that raises disturbing questions about ballot integrity in Colorado, the site of fiercely contested races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the governorship. When he raised the issue of filling out some of the unused ballots that are mailed to every household in the state this month, he was told by Meredith Hicks, the director of Work for Progress, a liberal group funded by Democratic Super PACS.: “That is not even like lying or something, if someone throws out a ballot, like if you want to fill it out you should do it.” She then brazenly offered O’Keefe, disguised as a middle-aged college instructor, a job with her group.

The video of O’Keefe’s encounters with other operatives is equally disturbing. He has a conversation with Greenpeace employee Christina Topping, and suggests he might have access to unused ballots from people who have recently moved out of college fraternity houses. “I mean it is putting the votes to good use,” she responds. “So really, truly, like yeah, that is awesome.”

Colorado secretary of state Scott Gessler, along with several county election clerks, have raised warning flags that a new state law that automatically mails a ballot to everyone is an engraved invitation to commit fraud. “Sending ballots to people who did not even ask for them or have moved out of state is asking for trouble” he told me. For example, little can stop someone who collects discarded ballots from trash cans, fills out the ballots, and mails them in. Election workers are supposed to compare signatures on registration records with signed ballots. But if a person has a “witness” who signs the ballot on the witness line, then the signatures do not have to match and the vote is counted.

Secretary of State Gessler had futile arguments with Democratic state legislators last year who insisted on ramming a bill through that mandated Colorado become the only state in the nation with both all-mail balloting and same-day registration. Under same-day registration someone can register to vote online, have a mail ballot sent to them, and never physically show up to register or vote. Other places that use same-day registration treat the vote as a provisional ballot pending verification. Colorado immediately counts the vote and there is no way to separate it out if the person who votes is later found ineligible. “We know people in other states with better integrity safeguards have cheated using the cover of these methods,” Gessler told me. A decade ago, Melody Rose, then a liberal professor at Oregon State University, concluded that state’s vote-by-mail system “brings a perpetual risk of systemic fraud” in elections with razor-thin margins.

“Voter fraud is incredibly difficult to detect and prosecute, absent a direct confession,” Gessler says as he notes that in other areas of law-breaking, we do not judge how much of it there is merely by the number of related prosecutions. But he also notes there is evidence of just how easy voter fraud is to commit. Last December, New York City’s Department of Investigation detailed how its undercover agents claimed at 63 polling places to be individuals who were in fact dead, had moved out of town, or who were in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, they were allowed to vote. (To avoid skewing results, they voted only for nonexistent write-in candidates.) How did the city’s Board of Elections respond? Did it immediately probe and reform their sloppy procedures? Not at all. It instead demanded that the investigators be prosecuted. Most officials are loath to admit how vulnerable election systems are, but privately many express worry that close elections could be flipped by fraud.

Nor are such sad examples limited to New York. In 2008, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of voter-ID laws in a 6–3 opinion written by John Paul Stevens, then the most liberal member of the court. He noted that the record “demonstrates that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.” Stevens had witnessed the Daley machine up close manipulate local elections through fraud and chicanery during a distinguished legal career in Chicago that included serving both as a special counsel to a commission rooting out corruption and as a judge.

I understand that Donna Brazile devoutly wants to wish away the notion of voter fraud. But by overwhelming margins, the American people believe it is a real problem and support steps to combat it. Indeed, a Rasmussen survey in 2013 found that a greater percentage of African Americans viewed voter fraud as a serious problem than did whites. That is because, as former Democratic congressman Artur Davis of Alabama told me: “Minority voters are often the biggest victims of voter fraud as reform movements in cities and depressed rural areas are crushed by fraudulent machine voting. I have seen it with my own eyes in Alabama.”

posted October 31, 2014 08:07 AM            

October 30, 2014
John Fund
Non-Citizens Are Voting
James O’Keefe documents the problem in North Carolina, where the Senate race is close

Could non-citizen voting be a problem in next week’s elections, and perhaps even swing some very close elections?

A new study by two Old Dominion University professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, indicated that 6.4 percent of all non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential election, and 2.2 percent in the 2010 midterms. Given that 80 percent of non-citizens lean Democratic, they cite Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race as one likely tipped by non-citizen voting. As a senator, Franken cast the 60th vote needed to make Obamacare law.

North Carolina features one of the closest Senate races in the country this year, between Democratic incumbent Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis. So what guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe, the man who has uncovered voter irregularities in states ranging from Colorado to New Hampshire, has learned in North Carolina is disturbing. This month, North Carolina officials found at least 145 illegal aliens, still in the country thanks to the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, registered to vote. Hundreds of other non-citizens may be on the rolls.

A voter-registration card is routinely issued without any identification check, and undocumented workers can use it for many purposes, including obtaining a driver’s license and qualifying for a job. And if a non-citizen has a voter-registration card, there are plenty of campaign operatives who will encourage him or her to vote illegally.

O’Keefe had a Brazilian-born immigrant investigator pose as someone who wanted to vote but was not a citizen. Greg Amick, the campaign manager for the Democrat running for sheriff in Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), was only too happy to help.

Greg Amick: Here’s a couple of things you can do. You do not have to have your driver’s license, but do you have any sort of identification?

Project Veritas investigator: But I do have my driver’s license.

Amick: Oh, you do. Show ’em that and you’re good.

PV: But the only problem, you know, I don’t want to vote if I’m not legal. I think that’s going to be a problem. I’m not sure.

Amick: It won’t be, it shouldn’t be an issue at all.

PV: No?

Amick: As long as you are registered to vote, you’ll be fine.

But North Carolina officials shouldn’t be “fine” with Amick, who appears to be afoul of a state law making it a felony “for any person, knowing that a person is not a citizen of the United States, to instruct or coerce that person to register to vote or to vote.”

The anything-goes attitude towards non-citizen voting crosses party lines. A campaign worker for the Republican running against Amick’s candidate for sheriff even called her boss before telling the O’Keefe investigator that it was for fine for non-citizens to vote: “Welcome aboard.”

Martin Kelly, whose son is running as a Democrat for superior-court judge in Mecklenburg, was blasé when asked whether non-citizens could vote. Kelly: “If you registered . . . [shrugs shoulders]. All they can do is say no. They can’t do anything else.”

Hans von Spakovsky, my co-author on a book we wrote on voter fraud in 2012, was in Charlotte on Monday for an NPR town hall on voting issues. “The local audience seemed skeptical that anyone in their state would be willing to commit fraud despite prior incidents,” he told me. “The O’Keefe video shows just how naïve they were.”

It’s no wonder that the two Old Dominion professors concluded that non-citizen votes may have been responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. “Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.”

The authors’ paper is consistent with other credible reports of non-citizen voting. For example, Colorado’s Republican secretary of state, Scott Gessler, unveiled a study in 2011 showing that almost 5,000 illegal aliens cast votes in the U.S. Senate election in that state in 2010.

In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period in one of the 94 current U.S. district courts were non-citizens.

In 2012, a local NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla., found that at least 100 individuals in one county had been excused from jury duty because they were not citizens but were registered to vote. Hinako Dennett, who is not a citizen, told the station that she voted “every year.”

A 1996 congressional race in California may have been stolen by non-citizen voting. Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 979 votes, and an investigation by the House Committee on Oversight turned up 624 invalid ballots cast by non-citizens who were on federal immigration records, along with 124 improper absentee ballots. The committee found “circumstantial” evidence of 196 additional non-citizen votes that it did not include in its tally. Its investigation could not determine the number of illegal-alien votes that might have been cast: “If there is a significant number of ‘documented aliens’ in INS records and on the Orange County voter registration rolls, how many illegal or undocumented aliens may be registered to vote in Orange County?”

An accurate assessment of the magnitude of non-citizen voting is difficult. There is no systematic check of voter-registration rolls by states to find non-citizens, and the relevant federal agencies refuse — in direct violation of federal law — to cooperate with those few state election officials who attempt to verify citizenship status.

In declining to cooperate with a request by Maryland for information on the citizenship status of registered voters, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service mistakenly declared that the agency could not release that data because “it is important to safeguard the confidentiality of each legal immigrant.” One result of this policy: In 2004, a guilty verdict in a murder trial in Maryland was jeopardized because a non-citizen was discovered on the jury, which had been drawn from local voter rolls. Maryland’s frustrated elections administrator complained, “There is no way of checking. . . . We have no access to any information about who is in the United States, legally or otherwise.”

Some states have tried to take action. Kansas and Arizona have put in place new commonsense proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting. But activist groups such as the League of Women Voters and Common Cause routinely challenge such measures in the courts.

posted October 31, 2014 08:22 AM            

Massive Non-Citizen Voting Uncovered in Maryland
Bryan Preston
October 29, 2014

An election integrity watchdog group is suing the state of Maryland, alleging that it has discovered massive and ongoing fraudulent voting by non-U.S. citizens in one county. But because of the way that the non-citizens are able to cast votes in elections, the fraud is likely happening in every single county and subdivision across the state. The group believes that the illegal voting has been happening for years.

The group, Virginia Voters Alliance, says that it compared how voters in Frederick County filled out jury duty statements compared with their voting records. The group’s investigation found that thousands of people in Frederick County who stated that they are not U.S. citizens on jury duty forms went on to cast votes in elections. Either they failed to tell the truth when they were summoned for jury duty, or they cast illegal votes. Both are crimes. The same group previously found that about 40,000 people are registered to vote in both Virginia and Maryland.

It is a federal crime to cast votes if you are not legally eligible to vote. Non-citizens, whether in the country legally or not, are prohibited from voting in most local and all state and federal elections. Yet the VVA investigation found that hundreds of non-citizens have been voting in Frederick County, Maryland. One in seven Maryland residents are non-U.S. citizens.

“The lawsuit is the equivalent of the lookout spotting the iceberg ahead of the Titanic,” state Del. Pat McDonough told the Tatler. He added that the group’s investigation found a voter fraud “smoking gun.”

Maryland state law makes it easier for non-citizens, both those present legally and those in the country against the law, to vote. Maryland issues drivers licenses to legal and illegal aliens. Driver’s licenses in turn make it easier under the Motor Voter law to register to vote. Maryland also offers copious taxpayer-funded social programs to non-citizens in the state.

The group filed suit in Baltimore’s U.S. District Court on Friday. They are suing the Frederick County Board of Elections and the Maryland State Board of Elections.

Del. Pat McDonough (R-Baltimore and Harford Counties) detailed the alleged fraud in a Maryland press conference today. He is calling for a special state prosecutor because the fraud may be taking place statewide, with significant impact on Maryland elections. Maryland currently holds 10 electoral votes in presidential elections. McDonough is also proposing legislation including voter ID to close the loopholes that he says non-citizens are using to cast votes.

In a statement, Del. McDonough says:

There are frequent allegations in America and Maryland about the existence of voter fraud. In the case I am presenting today, there is documentation and a track record. The numbers and facts from the records in Frederick County are the tip of the iceberg. When these numbers are multiplied by including the other subdivisions in Maryland, the potential number is alarming and could change the outcome of a close statewide election.

Even more dangerous is the probability of many local elections that are decided by a few votes could be affected. All 188 members of the Maryland General Assembly are standing for re-election as well as many local office holders.

The important election that we have coming up demands that citizens’ votes are not diluted or cancelled by non-citizens who are not legally permitted to vote. The sanctity of the ballot box, because of the flawed system we are pointing out, has already been violated in previous elections.

The purpose of the lawsuit is to mandate those responsible for the administration of the election process will remove the non-citizens from the final voting count.

The purpose of the investigation by the special prosecutor is to penetrate more deeply statewide and determine why this fraud or any other related violation was allowed to occur.

The purpose of the legislation is to plug the massive loophole in current law which permitted these fraudulent practices to take place.

Maryland is a Democratic stronghold especially around its larger cities, but the governor’s race there is tightening as Republican Larry Hogan gains ground. Illegal votes could tip the balance if the legal vote is close enough on election day. “What if Hogan loses by 500 votes or 1000 votes?” McDonough asked.

posted November 04, 2014 07:25 AM            

More Florida voter fraud? 3000 registrations list UPS stores as residence
Allen West
April 26, 2014

If there is one thing I learned in the 2012 election cycle, it was about voter fraud. My conservative warrior associate, Katherine Engelbrecht, and her organization, True the Vote, took up the mantle against the St. Lucie County Supervisor of Elections, Gertrude Walker, who admitted to sending “questionable” results to the Florida Secretary of State. It was somewhat disheartening that the Florida Secretary of State and Attorney General sat back, watched the news reports, and did nothing.

With that background, I’d like to share a story written by Gregg Prentice: “Voter Fraud? If they’re not catching the easy stuff, what else are they missing?”

Prentice asks, are some of Florida’s Supervisors of Elections skirting the law? Supervisors are tasked with maintaining an accurate voter roll. One of the requirements of the Supervisors is to ensure voters provide a legal residence address. Yet a December 2013 analysis shows more than 3,000 voter registrations statewide listing their residence address at a UPS store, potentially illegally.

Florida Law is clear and, with minor exception, requires that voter registrations listing other than an address of legal residence should not be accepted, because they are “ineligible” (F.S. 98.045 (1)(h)). In fact, it’s actually a felony to willfully submit any false voter registration information (F.S.104.011(2)). Accordingly, if these “ineligible” registrations are found to exist, Florida statutes also provide for their prompt correction or removal (F.S. 98.075(6) & (7)).

So there you go. It’s a felony for this to have happened, but how can it be that a citizen watchdog had to uncover this Florida voter fraud while the people paid with our taxpayer dollars have not a clue? Is it not a mandated responsibility of the Florida State Supervisors of Elections to maintain these voter address rolls? I’d say so.

A review of the state-mandated voter registration list reveals that of the 3,000 UPS store registrations:

– 1,200 match addresses already known as commercial that were ignored
– 500 match addresses erroneously marked as residential
– 1,100 have no match at all.

The question is, when stories like this surface, how can the voting electorate believe there is integrity in their electoral process? We’ve reported here on the Hamilton County (Cincinnati) Ohio poll worker, Melowese Richardson, who voted nearly seven times. She was supposed to have a five-year sentence but thanks to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, she served just about 18 months.

Oh and by the way, she wasn’t charged by the federal government with any type of voter fraud allegations — so much for Eric Holder’s concern about voter suppression.

You see, the real voter suppression comes when fraud exists, as it negates an individual’s lawful and proper vote. The fraudulent shenanigans in the 2012 Congressional District 18 election in St. Lucie County — and to some extent Palm Beach County — amounted to voter suppression. But as we reported previously, it’s not voter suppression Democrats are worried about, it’s fraud suppression.

In the case of the UPS store registrations, it’s not a recent phenomenon. More than 2,300 of the more than 3,000 recently discovered UPS store registrations had the exact same UPS store listed as their residence at least 15 months prior. Approximately 800 of those 2,300 likely “ineligible” registrations voted in Florida’s during the 2012 General Election.

Worse however, since Federal Elections occur in even years, the Supervisors are required by law to perform their primary “list maintenance” during the odd years. Yet these 3,000 UPS store registrations were identified in December of 2013 as the Supervisors’ odd year voter roll efforts came to a close.

So it’s pretty clear too many of our Supervisors aren’t nearly as effective in their jobs as one might hope – and they’re not complying with Florida statute.

So in which counties did this occur?

According to the report, of the 67 counties in Florida, 38 were clean. The majority of the “unclean” counties have said they’re working on it. But three counties have not responded at all or weakly: Broward, Orange and Hillsborough. Prentice says Broward county receives the “here’s your sign” award with fully 40 percent of the 3,000 potentially ineligible records, and simply responding “they’re in process.”

Note: Broward represents only about 10 percent of the total state population.