The United States “has a long and unfortunate history of ballot fraud,” the Heritage Foundation has said, in a 2008 report titled Democracy in Danger — and the fraud has gotten worse since then. As Indiana state police Superintendent Doug Carter told RTV6-TV last month, “There’s voter fraud and voter forgery in every state of America.”
Voter fraud almost always favors Democratic candidates and happens mostly in toss-up states — the states that actually determine presidential elections. There is now solid evidence that despite their claims of innocence, key Democrats are aware of the fraud.
For example, in a 2015 email revealed by Wikileaks, Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta expressed his concern about past voting fraud by Obama campaign supporters. Old friends of the Clintons “are reliving the 08 caucuses where they believe the Obama forces flooded the caucuses with ineligible voters.”
Conservative undercover journalist James O’Keefe and his Project Veritas has uncovered attempts by Democrats to commit voter fraud, much of which has gone ignored by the left-leaning mainstream media. For example, Project Veritas recently videotaped Democratic operatives Robert Creamer and Scott Foval discussing election fraud. Foval, the national field director for Americans United for Change, explained how voters outside of Wisconsin could be brought into the state, using cars with Wisconsin plates to avoid suspicion. “We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you [obscene description] for fifty years and we’re not going to stop now,” he said. Both have since lost their jobs.
Here’s a review of the various forms of election fraud to expect this election season, with examples from this and previous campaigns.
Voter Impersonation, Double Voting and Bribery
Dead voters may account for a large amount of voter fraud. In September, for example, a Young Democrat in Virginia attempted to register 19 dead people to vote through the organization HarrisonburgVotes. He was only caught when a clerk recognized the name of a deceased World War II veteran he had submitted. The group, which is headed by the chairman of the congressional district’s Democratic Committee, has fired the young man and taken down its website and social media accounts. “This is proof that voter fraud not only exists but is ongoing and is a threat to the integrity of our elections,” said William J. Howell (R-Stafford), speaker of the state’s House of Delegates.
Last month, three dead voters were found on the newly registered or re-registered voting list in Hamilton County, Ohio. They had been added after they had passed away.
Although much of the election fraud is taking place in swing states, fraud continues in states known for the worst election fraud. Chicago, infamous for its dead voters, continues to have the most egregious problems. CBS 2 discovered that “119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade.” Relatives report they can’t even get their deceased loved ones removed from voter rolls. One man told the station last month that he has asked multiple times to have his dead mother removed from voter registration. Even though she died in 1998, records show she voted in 2010.
In Indiana, officials are investigating hundreds of voter registrations that appear fraudulent. An organization called Indiana Voter Registration Project submitted the registrations, which contain “a combination of fake names, addresses and dates of birth with real information.” Hendricks County Clerk Debbie Hoskins caught the discrepancies and notified law enforcement. The faulty voter registrations have showed up in eight other Indiana counties. The spokeswoman for the organization is Christy Setzer, who has worked as a Democrat strategist for the presidential campaigns of Al Gore, Howard Dean and Chris Dodd.
Another technique, known as double voting or ballot stuffing, lets people vote twice.“You’d be surprised how often people double vote,” Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told CBS 4 in Colorado. “Two of the cases are serial double voters. I think people discover they can get away with it and keep doing it.” Kobach says some of the voters cast ballots in both Colorado and Kansas, and believes 10,000 people are registered to vote in both states.
New Hampshire Republican gubernatorial candidate Chris Sunnunu accused Democrats of arranging to have Massachusetts residents vote in New Hampshire this election. Massachusetts is solidly Democratic, while New Hampshire is divided between the two parties. New Hampshire is one of 13 states that allows voters to register on the day of the election.
And there’s simple bribery. Voters are rewarded for voting a certain way. In the past, homeless people were reportedly bribed with cigarettes. Kankakee County State Attorney Jamie Boyd is investigating reports that voters were bribed with gifts to vote for Democrats, including Clinton.
Fraud by Election Officials
This category includes officials throwing out ballots for illegitimate reasons and allowing ineligible voters to vote. In 2013, undercover New York City police officers showed up at 63 different precincts pretending to be prohibited voters, but in 61 precincts, or 97 percent of the time, they were allowed to vote (they voted for a dummy name to avoid influencing the election). The officers assumed the identities of dead people, voters who had moved, or felons.
Similarly, in the 2012 election, O’Keefe showed up to a New Hampshire polling place with some assistants, asking for ballots for 10 deceased voters. Their names had not yet been purged from the voting rolls, and poll workers handed them the ballots without asking for ID, a violation of state law.
A close friend who lives in Colorado volunteered in 2012 to serve as a “judge” inside a heavily Hispanic polling location, as the final arbiter when there were disputes over ballots and procedures. She told me she saw rampant fraud and nothing was done about it:
I had a guy from Mexico tell me proudly that he was here to vote. He boasted that he didn’t think he could vote because “he did not have the Papers” but “the Obama people said not to worry, just to show his Xcel energy bill.” Sure enough, he was registered!!
Democrats had gone door to door registering people within a week of the election, she said, leaving little time to verify their citizenship. On voting day, she said, she saw as many as 22 people in the same apartment registered to vote.
Many people were in the wrong precinct and were only 3 blocks away but if we gave them the option of going to their correct precinct, or filling out a provisional ballot, the two annoying lawyers from the Justice Department would immediately ask us why we didn’t allow that person to vote!! After realizing that I wasn’t accountable to them or even that I didn’t need to speak to them, I told them to leave me alone.
She called the Secretary of State’s office the next day but wasn’t allowed to speak to him. The aide who answered the phone “told me it didn’t mean that there was any fraud that had happened. … I thought I was doing something patriotic and noble but the fraud was going on right in front of me and there was not a thing I could do about it!! Very frustrating!”
Fraud by Government Officials
New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio’s new ID program is allowing massive voter fraud, said Manhattan Board of Elections Commissioner Alan Schulkin, in a Project Vertias video. By not requiring real ID, the Democrats are able to “bus people around to vote. … They put them in a bus and go poll site to poll site.”
The problem is so bad he preferred voter ID laws. “Anybody can go in there and say, ‘I am Joe Smith, I want an ID card,’” he explained. When they go to vote, “The law says you can’t ask for anything. Which they really should be able to do.”
In Missouri, Mayor Ted Hoskins of Berkeley, Mo., a Democrat, and his supporters are accused of requiring early ballot voters to submit their ballots in unsealed envelopes, which is contrary to law. Some residents say they were encouraged to fill out ballots and turn them over to Hoskins or one of his supporters. This could allow tampering of the ballots, so prosecutors and the FBI are currently investigating.
Eric Fey, Democratic director of the Election Board, said, “There were different colored inks and some where the ovals were filled in a very distinct fashion and some that were filled in a very different distinct fashion; things that you just don’t see on other ballots.” Fey said the results benefited Hoskins and his allies.
In 2012, Hoskins received the highest share of early ballots of any candidate, 36 percent. The next highest share among mayoral candidates was a mere 14 percent, and countywide, the share of early ballots averaged 8.6 percent. Hoskins defeated his opponent by 517 votes to 418.
Voting Machine Fraud
Hackers told CBS how simple it is to hack electronic voting machines. For $15, a voter can buy a card that is capable of manipulating the machine — without ever leaving the voting booth. “I can insert it, and then it resets the card, and now I’m able to vote again,” said Brian Varner, a principle researcher at the computer security company Symantec.
Symantec Security Response director Kevin Haley said the machines can be hacked after all the votes have been cast. CBS reports that only 60 percent of states routinely conduct audits after elections by comparing paper trails. The swing states of Virginia and Pennsylvania don’t even collect paper records, so there is no way to conduct audits.
Several people in Texas reported that voting machines in multiple counties changed their votes from Trump to Clinton.
Filling Out Ballots for Others to “Assist” Them
The elderly are particularly susceptible to offers for assistance with voting, and so party hacks target nursing homes pretending to care about their right to vote — while really ensuring they vote Democrat. The Dallas Star-Telegram reports that Texans have “witnessed” more than one request for a mail-in ballot, which is against the law unless it involves immediate family members. “One apparently witnessed five applications from the same address, a nursing home or a retirement center,” the paper reports. The case has been turned over to investigators.
Texas Governor Greg Abbot is conducting an investigation into a “vote-harvesting scheme” in Tarrant County, expressing concern over as many as 20,000 suspicious looking early ballots. Crimes being investigated include “improperly serving as a witness for multiple voters, forgery and tampering with a governmental record, unlawful possession of a carrier envelope, and improper assistance.”
Throwing Out Ballots
Ballots can also be fraudulently lost. Election officials, party hacks and even Post Office employees can come across early ballots and dispose of them so the votes are never counted. For example, partisan groups frequently run “vote-by-mail” services, to aid voters with turning in their ballots. But it is all too easy to pretend to be a conservative organization, collect early ballots from Republicans, then trash them.
In Illinois, 1,500 applications for an early ballot were discovered languishing in a Post Office box, uncollected and not forwarded to the proper election authorities for processing, which would prevent those who applied from voting. Although it is not clear which third-party organization had asked for them, the elections clerk believes it was voter suppression.
The Washington Times reported in 2014 that unauthorized people were going door-to-door in Colorado collecting ballots from unsuspecting voters, who will never know if their ballots were ever delivered and counted.
The Depths of Voter Fraud
Election officials are quick to explain incidents of voter fraud as clerical errors that don’t happen very often. To admit election fraud is more rampant would make them look bad, resulting in voters voting them out of office.
Compounding the problem, election officials are frequently under attack for bogus accusations of election fraud. I was the elections attorney for Maricopa County Elections Department from 2005 to 2006, and to this day still see frivolous lawsuits filed against the department, costing taxpayers millions of dollars to defend. Because election fraud is a real problem, frivolous complaints get more attention than they should.
We may never know the depths of voter fraud. But as technology advances, with its correlating advances in investigative scrutiny such as by Project Veritas and Wikileaks, even eliminating voter ID laws may not be enough to hide Democrat fraud much longer. (For more from the author of “What Kind of Fraud to Expect This Election” please click HERE)
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