A student at James Madison University in Virginia ended up making an excellent case for voter IDs — but it wasn’t by writing a thoughtful op-ed or making a policy speech. 21-year-old Andrew Spieles pled guilty to filing 18 false voter registration applications…for the dead.
Unless the ballot boxes are six feet under, the young Democrat operative will be spending the next 100 to 120 days living ‘Orange is the New Liberal.’
Spieles worked for Harrisonburg Votes, an organization affiliated with the Democratic Party, from July to August of 2016, and also worked as a general voter registration volunteer since October 2015, according to the statement of facts.
His troubles began when an assistant in the Registrar’s office of Harrisonburg noticed one of the forms had been registered to the dead father of a Rockingham County judge, on August 4. The police department was notified and the investigation hit Harrisonburg Votes on August 15.
At first, Spieles speculated with another worker that someone else was the mastermind behind the plot. The next day, Spieles confessed to that same employee that indeed it was him that fabricated all 18 registration forms.
He falsified social security numbers, and created birthdays from names on “walk sheets,” which are maps of neighborhoods created by political groups with names and addresses used for door-to-door canvassing. Harrisonburg Votes fired Spieles that same day, a job in which he earned $350 a week.
Spieles explained that he simply wanted to help a friend meet his regular registration quota, but then added that he wanted to “redeem himself” after his poor summer performance didn’t back up the more 2,000 new voters he rounded up earlier that year. Spieles had only intended for the forms to reach the VAN system (Democratic voter software), not the Registrar’s office, even though it was regular practice every Thursday for the forms to be delivered to that office.
The city of Harrisonburg was won by Hillary Clinton in the general election, with 56.8 percent of the vote, while Rockingham County, the surrounding area around H’Burg, was captured by President Trump with 69.3 percent of the county’s vote.
Perhaps a word to the wise; next time you want to enjoy the fruits of success, do it the right way, even if it is hard.
