Chalk up yet another chink in the armor of the Democratic-media axis pushing the lie that vote fraud is essentially nonexistent. By now, there may be more chinks than remaining armor.
The latest example comes in the form of a stunning video by the conservative investigative outlet Project Veritas, detailing what looks like massive violations by campaign workers allegedly connected to radical Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota. The video begins with a man named Liban Mohamed driving with a carload of hundreds of absentee ballot envelopes, many of them open, with ballots still blank, bragging about his vote-harvesting efforts and saying “money is everything,” including in politics.
In Minnesota, as in most states, vote harvesting is illegal. It involves attempts by third parties to collect and deliver absentee ballots on a massive scale. In many cases, it preys on the elderly or others of diminished capacity. As Mohamed explained in a recorded phone call, the Minnesota scheme involved having the harvesters actually request the ballots in the name of the elderly citizens, and then the ballot is “taken away” from the voter to be filled out as the harvester wishes.
Other would-be voters, on video, explained how workers for Omar “come to us, to our apartments, they say this year, ‘You will vote for Ilhan.’” The harvesters fill out the forms and tell the voters to “stay home” on Election Day. In return, the harvesters fork over cash “when we sign the voting document, and they fill it out.” And so on. The full video well explains the situation, and what’s both wrong and illegal about it.
This is the kind of thing so many conservatives warn about in saying vote fraud is a serious problem and that widespread mail-in voting is particularly susceptible to fraud or mammoth error. The same liberals who insist that vote fraud is almost nonexistent then say that when apparent or alleged frauds like these are detected, it shows “the system works” to stop it from occurring. This is nonsense. The allegation is that this practice has been occurring for years in Minneapolis, unpunished — and absent undercover video, it still would be unacknowledged, and it still hasn’t come close to being punished.
The Left’s argument is akin to saying that if shoplifters are caught, it proves that the only shoplifters that exist are the ones who are caught. Or if some students get caught cheating, nobody else could possibly be cheating as well.
This isn’t logic; it’s willful deception.
Rarely does a week go by when I, as a journalist, don’t see news releases about illegal or hugely incompetent voting procedures, with a significant subset of them of large enough volume to swing close elections. On Monday morning, for example, came news of an indictment last Thursday in Texas in which a Democratic county commissioner and three others are accused of 134 felony counts of mail-in vote fraud.
Many state voter lists are notoriously out of date or otherwise unreliable. Last week, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative election-law group, launched a database showing “voter rolls saturated with alarming errors,” including “thousands of probable deceased and duplicate registrants, as well as cases of individuals credited for voting more than once.” More than 8,000 people, for example, were recorded as having voted in two states at once on the same day.
Project Veritas’s sting against the Minnesota vote-harvesting operation shows just one way people can and do work to rig elections. Like the devil in the movie The Usual Suspects, the greatest trick that vote-fraudsters ever pulled was advancing the claim that the fraud doesn’t exist.
