EXCLUSIVE: Audit Finds Signs of
Fraud in New Mexico House Race, by Fred Lucas, 2/15/19.
An audit of absentee
ballots suggests fraud may have occurred in one of the closest House races in
the country, The Daily Signal has learned.
Democrat Xochitl Torres
Small squeaked by Republican Yvette Herrell in the final results of the Nov. 6
election.
On election night,
Herrell declared victory in the race to represent New Mexico’s 2nd
Congressional District. But as more votes were counted, Torres Small secured the win.
The roughly 3,500-vote victory for Torres Small—out of about 200,000 cast in
the southern New Mexico district—relied heavily on absentee ballots from Doña
Ana County, the largest county in the district, including the Las Cruces
area.
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A new audit report obtained by The Daily Signal
alleges a “concerted effort” to push for absentee votes where New Mexico voter
ID laws are not enforced. It also points to potential fraud in applying for
absentee ballots, and says a significant number of absentee ballots were
time-stamped after the 7 p.m. deadline election night.
The report was prepared
for the losing Herrell campaign by Full Compliance Consulting LLC and Herrell
campaign lawyer Carter B. Harrison.
Herrell’s campaign is
not contesting the outcome of the 2018 contest, but sought the review based on
its concerns that extra votes appeared to pour in.
Torres Small spokeswoman
Jennifer Lee did not respond to phone and email inquiries from The Daily Signal
for this story.
Torres Small, 34, who
was sworn in Jan. 3, replaced retiring Rep. Steve Pearce, a Republican who was
re-elected by 26 points in 2016.
The House seat has been
held by a Republican for all but one term since 1968.
Donald Trump, the
Republican nominee for president, won the district by 10 points over Democrat
Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The report says the
consulting firm reviewed about 12,000 requests for absentee ballots, 8,577
outer envelopes for absentee ballots, and hundreds of rejected applications
from Doña Ana County.
“There were not enough
irregularities in Dona Ana County alone to alter our race (though local races
could have been altered),” Harrison, the Herrell campaign lawyer, told The
Daily Signal in a written response. “But if other counties were to be found to
have similar irregularities, the race certainly could have been altered by
them.”
On election night, media
outlets called the race for Herrell, 54, who has been a member of the New
Mexico House of Representatives since 2011.
But well after midnight,
Harrison said, the office of New Mexico’s secretary of state informed the
Herrell campaign of 4,000 absentee ballots in Doña Ana County still to be
counted, which would not have flipped the race to Torres Small, who previously
had not held elective office.
However, the state
informed the campaign of another 4,000 absentee votes that had been counted but
not tabulated, which was enough to change the outcome.
The report says
nongovernmental groups “are almost certainly engaging in at best aggressive—and
at worst fraudulent—procurement of absentee ballot applications.”
This would have involved
an outside group that requested a large quantity of absentee ballots on behalf
of others, possibly without their knowledge.
Fully 25 percent of the
people who purportedly requested absentee ballots from the Doña Ana County
clerk didn’t mail them back, according to the report.
That is more than twice
the statewide average for unreturned absentee ballots. To receive an absentee
ballot for mailing back, a voter first must send in an application providing a
reason why he or she can’t vote in person on Election Day.
“This is suggestive of
the possibility that someone was submitting absentee ballot applications for
Democrats and those deemed likely to vote for Democrats,” the report says,
adding:
Also
consistent with potential absentee ballot-application fraud is the apparently
high rate of applications rejected for incorrect Voter ID or for submitting
duplicate applications, i.e., where the same voter purportedly applies twice
for an absentee ballot.
In 2016, a presidential
year, 17.5 percent who had absentee ballots from Doña Ana County didn’t mail in
the ballots, a percentage almost identical to the statewide rate and slightly
above the comparable counties of Bernalillo and Chaves.
However, in 2018, the
statewide rate of unreturned ballots was 12.1 percent, and comparable counties
were below the statewide average.
“In the 2018 election,
there was a concerted effort to encourage absentee voting,” the report says,
adding: The
numbers cited above, both with regard to the steep increase in total absentee
votes cast as well as the high number of unreturned ballots, cannot be
explained any other way. Much of this effort may have been perfectly lawful,
but the 25 percent non-return rate indicates such a high rate of ‘unawareness’
on the part of those who supposedly requested the ballots that it is possible
there may have been fraud in this area, as well.
Harvesting absentee
ballots would be a fourth-degree felony under state law if applications were
altered, Harrison said.
The legal case against
mass procurement of absentee ballot applications could depend on whether
forgery occurred, said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative
at The Heritage Foundation
“It depends on whether
the organizations [filled out applications] themselves and forged the
signatures of the voters, or did they go to the voters and say, ‘Would you like
an absentee ballot?’, and help them with that,” von Spakovsky told The Daily
Signal.
Sometimes, absentee
voter fraud is easy to spot, he said. “If on Election Day, a
candidate wins 60-40, but all the absentee ballots are 90 percent for the
loser, that doesn’t make any sense,” said von Spakovsky, a former Justice
Department lawyer. “Absentee ballots usually have the same proportion as votes
on Election Day. If they don’t, that’s a possible clue that something may have
been done.”
The report also found
that 577 absentee ballots in the New Mexico race were time-stamped after the 7
p.m. deadline. “We do have strong
concerns about those ballots. The statute is clear: No ballots may be accepted
after the deadline,” Harrison said.
The report cites some
instances of unusual addresses for absentee voters, noting:
—5
envelopes that provided a registration address that did not match the absentee
register.
—25
envelopes that listed 845 N. Motel—the county clerk’s address—as the
registration address.
—49
envelopes with no registration address provided.
—23
envelopes with a P.O. Box provided instead of a registration address.
Regarding the state’s
voter ID law, the report contends that “there is no convincing basis … to
exempt absentee ballots from the same requirements that are mandatory for all
other methods of voting.”
Previously, New Mexico
required the signature of a witness as well as the voter on an absentee ballot.
However, in 1993, the state Legislature passed a law removing that
requirement.
The report notes that as
a result, absentee ballots need only the voter’s signature.
“Today, however, the
name, address, and year of birth fields are the Voter ID, and it makes no sense
not to verify that information, as is required for every other type of voting,”
the report says. “The removal of the second signature eliminated the crucial
element in confirming the voter was who he or she claimed to be, but replaced
it with the new ID standard.”
Neither the New Mexico
Secretary of State’s Office, which oversees elections, nor the Doña Ana County
Clerk’s Office responded to inquiries about the situation.
“We do not require photo
ID in New Mexico, but we do require voters to provide their name, address, and
year of birth,” Harrison said, adding:
This
law was ignored with the absentee ballots in Doña Ana County. More generally,
if absentee voting is going to be converted from a backstop form of voting for
out-of-town or bedridden voters to something that independent groups try to
promote through mail and on-the-ground canvassing, then there frankly needs to
be more attention given to security—and more attention given to the operation
of those groups.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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