Voter
fraud 'much more widespread' than Virginia, Pennsylvania, Trump 'not prepared'
to deal with illegal onslaught, by Leo Hohmann, 10/6/16
A new
report by a national watchdog organization found evidence of major voter fraud going
on in Virginia and Pennsylvania, but the problems are likely affecting many
more states, says the group’s leader.
The same
organization that uncovered fraud in Virginia and in Philadelphia – the Public
Interest Legal Foundation – is also filing lawsuits claiming voter fraud is
taking place in Broward County, Florida, and in Wake County, North Carolina.
And, WND
has learned, an investigation by a separate watchdog group in Maryland has
uncovered major irregularities there. The
Public Interest Legal Foundation’s report found more than 1,000 instances of
illegal immigrants or non-citizens being registered to vote in just eight
Virginia counties. They cast nearly 200 ballots in elections before being
purged from voter rolls.
The other
125 counties in Virginia did not provide data, so the problem is much more
widespread than the small sample would indicate, said attorney J. Christian
Adams, who represents the foundation.
“It’s not
just these two states,” Adams said. “These are just the two states we focused
on.” Read the full report on voter fraud
in Virginia and Pennsylvania. Most
states fail to purge their voter rolls of non-U.S. citizens – those here
illegally and those here legally but who are not citizens, said Adams. The
problem is getting the data.
Refusing
to crack down - Adams, a former U.S. Department of Justice lawyer who authored
the book “Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda
of the Obama Justice Department,” said states have plenty of tools they could
use to purge their voter rolls of fraudulent voters, but they refuse to use
those tools.
One of
the tools is the jury-duty process. Persons who register to vote get placed in
the pool of jury duty applicants in most states, but it’s only when they get a
notice calling them to serve on a jury that many will then admit they are not
citizens. There are methods of cross-checking the jury duty rolls, as well as
the driver’s license rolls. “I wish
Virginia was doing that,” Adams said. “The governor vetoed legislation last
year that would have required it.”
So how
were the illegal voters caught in Virginia? “These people lied when they got a
driver’s license, their license came up for renewal and then they told the
truth and it set off a flag,” Adams said. Basically, they turned themselves in.
The
foundation’s report shows the majority of fraud consists of non-citizens lying
on voter registration forms, saying they are U.S. citizens when they are not.
Federal law makes this a felony, but offenders are rarely prosecuted.
States
all use the same voter registration form, which places them on the “honor
system,” essentially taking the word of the applicant that he or she is a U.S.
citizen when they check the box declaring their citizenship, Adams said. “We
have to be on the honor system because of the 1993 National Voter Registration
Act, also called the motor voter law,” Adams said. “It’s a federally mandated
form.”
Trump not
prepared - Adams said he does not
believe the presidential campaign of Donald Trump is prepared to counter the
problem of fraudulent immigrant voters casting their ballots for Hillary Clinton.
“I don’t
think they quite understand the nature of the problem or the solutions. It’s
not easy stuff,” he said. “The solution is not something that’s done in October
before an election; it’s something done in January in the state legislatures
and throughout the year, to make sure the states use all the tools available to
purge their voter rolls, and Virginia and Pennsylvania aren’t doing that.”
“States
everywhere are not using all the tools that are available to them,” he added. He
refused to speculate on why states were failing in this area other than a lack
of will.
“In
Virginia, they tried to conceal the information, and in Philadelphia they
didn’t care about the information,” he said. “Philadelphia doesn’t even care
now. They don’t ask for the information. They don’t try to figure out who the
ineligible people are on their voting rolls, and in Virginia [most counties]
won’t even give us the information; they’re hiding it.”
The
conclusion to the foundation’s report states: “The problem is real and the
solutions are simple. What is happening in Virginia is happening in every other
state. Your vote is at risk and elected officials must act. You can help.
Please contact your local election officials to ask what they are doing to
ensure voter lists are accurate and free of ineligible voters.” It also
includes a list of recommendations on how states can curtail voter fraud.
Maryland
analysis finds dirty dealing in Baltimore - A separate group of activists has
also found irregularities in Maryland’s largest city, Baltimore. Lewis Porter
is a Maryland resident who in 2013 started Maryland-20-20 Watch, a watchdog
organization concerned with upholding the integrity of Maryland’s voting rolls.
Specifically, the group has requested ballot data from the city of Baltimore,
which is Maryland’s largest voting district with a whopping 296 precincts.
The State
Board of Elections took more than 75 days to respond to an open records request
seeking ballot information on the April 26 primary election, “They’re supposed
to respond within 30 days and give you an idea of when they can comply, in a
timely manner,” he said. “And they didn’t do any of that.”
He said
he had to contact the attorney general’s office to get the Board of Elections
to respond to his request. When they did, what he found shocked him.
Porter
says widespread irregularities were found, especially with so-called provincial
ballots, which are ballots cast by voters outside of their home precincts. “They
stuff the ballot box with provincial ballots,” he said.
The state
has very clear rules, set by law, on how provincial ballots are to be treated.
They are supposed to be stored in a secure place and only opened and reviewed
after the election, when a panel decides if they are to be accepted or
rejected.
He said
many voting sites in the city opened the paper ballots and placed them in the
counting machine. “Some of the precincts reported 100 percent turnout, which is
insane. In Baltimore, there are 296 precincts, and we think this is part of the
problem, an over-abundance of precincts per capita. So we tabulated and divided
it out and put the pieces back together, and what we found out was that certain
precincts had an extreme number of errors.”
The most
egregious errors were found in one precinct where Maryland 20-20 found a 57
percent error rate, meaning for every 100 ballots that were entered for a
tabulation, 57 contained irregularities. “This was the highest. The next
highest precinct was 41 percent, and another had 28 percent and down from
there. There were 10 or 11 precincts that had corruptions rates of 10 percent
or higher, he said. Nearly 80
percent of the precincts had at least a 1 percent error rate, Maryland 20-20
reported.
“The
explanation was the poll workers didn’t know that they were not supposed to be
opening these provincial ballots and counting them until after the election,”
Porter said. “It’s over-the-top ridiculous. The law is written. It’s clear.
You’re supposed to fill out the provincial ballot, fold it over. It’s put into
a bag, and it’s supposed to be put in locked storage and not touched again
until after the election. The bags were just sitting out in the open,
unlocked.” Maryland 20-20 contends that these ballots were not only open and
counted but they also destroyed ballots in some precincts.
“They
either entered and counted these provincial ballots when they shouldn’t have or
they could not explain the absence of a paper ballot,” Porter said. “The
mainstream media have not spoken on this issue in Maryland.” Porter said he’s
been going around speaking to groups about his findings. When he asks his
audiences what level of tainted ballots would be acceptable, he inevitably is
told “zero.”
“The
bottom line is, when I ask how many inconsistencies or irregularities are
acceptable, everyone says ‘zero.’ They are supposed to give an explanation for
these irregularities, and they cannot explain it. Baltimore city rules
Maryland’s votes because of its corrupted elections. It does it for the
presidential elections, for senators, some of the congressional elections. It
all goes into a corrupted process. At a minimum, we’re saying it’s unexplained
inconsistencies. The contamination rate is way too high.”
“All of
the driver’s licenses, voter registration forms, financial aid forms,
everything, it’s just ‘check, check, check,'” said Ann Corcoran, another
immigration watchdog in Maryland who blogs at Refugee Resettlement Watch.
How Trump
can clean up the fraud - Robert
Romano, senior editor of Americans for Limited Government, recently wrote that
Trump, if elected, should make cleaning up the nation’s voter rolls a national
priority. “Donald
Trump has promised to tackle the issue of illegal immigration as a central
plank of his platform. Should he win the election in November, he might also
wish to address the critical issue of non-citizen voting,” Romano writes in an article for NetRightDaily.com. All Trump would have
to do is enforce existing laws, Romano says.
For
starters, since it is already illegal for non-citizens to either vote or
register to vote, and under 18 U.S. Code § 371 it is illegal for two or more persons to
conspire to break any federal law, Romano says a new administration “could
force states to purge their rolls by providing them a verifiable list of
eligible and ineligible voters in every state using existing birth,
immigration, naturalization, marriage and state motor vehicle records.
“The
federal government could then issue a regulation based on those laws and
utilizing that data to compel states to purge voter rolls of ineligible
non-citizens.” If the
states refuse, Romano notes, they would then be participating in a criminal
conspiracy to commit election fraud and state officials could be prosecuted and
imprisoned for each count — “one for every non-citizen voter they refused to
purge from the records.” “I venture to guess those state voter rolls would be
cleaned up in a jiffy.”
“The
issue boils down to maintaining integrity in our electoral processes, and to
ensure our democracy cannot be overtaken by foreigners outside the franchise.
And by creating a very real penalty when laws against non-citizen voting are
violated. “Only citizens should vote, and perhaps, for the first time, a Trump
administration could make sure that’s the case.”
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