Vote Fraud

Four more plead guilty in Los Angeles homeless voter fraud scheme
Homeless received cigarettes, money in exchange for fraudulent signatures.
Updated: July 31, 2020 - 12:29pm


Four Los Angeles residents have pleaded guilty to organizing a voter fraud scheme in the city's Skid Row neighborhood, paying homeless people with cigarettes and cash to obtain fake signatures on various voter documents.

The defendants "admitted their role in a scheme where money and cigarettes were offered to homeless people on Skid Row in exchange for false and forged signatures on ballot petitions and voter registration forms," the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office said in an announcement this week.

The admissions of guilt follow another participant in the scheme pleading guilty in February to taking part in the fraudulent activity.

The scheme specifically involved "soliciting hundreds of false and/or forged signatures on state ballot petitions and voter registration forms by offering homeless people $1 and/or cigarettes for their participation," the district attorney's office said.

The crimes took place over two election cycles — 2016 and 2018. Four other individuals implicated in the scheme "face various charges including use of false names on a petition and voter fraud," according to a press release from the prosecutor's office.

The guilty parties in the case have thus far received sentences ranging from jail time to suspended sentences to formal probation.

The fucker is gonna push it to the max until 11/3

28 Million Mail-In Ballots Went Missing in Last Four Elections
By Mark Hemingway, April 24, 2020

Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.

States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency’s survey questions. This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.

Although there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which compiled the public data provided from the Election Assistance Commission, says that the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security.

These questions are particularly relevant as the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing states across the country to rapidly expand vote-by-mail operations in an election year. Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have proposed the Natural Disaster and Emergency Ballot Act of 2020, a bill that would allow every eligible voter the opportunity to vote by mail, regardless of state laws governing mail-in ballots.

A significant increase in mail-in voting this fall could greatly incentivize “ballot harvesting,” where third parties collect mail-in ballots on behalf of voters and deliver them to election officials. There’s long been a consensus that such a practice incentivizes fraud, and ballot harvesting is illegal in most of the country. Public debate over the issue has intensified in recent years after a GOP operative in North Carolina was indicted for crimes related to ballot harvesting in 2018.

That same election cycle California legalized ballot harvesting, and observers say the practice played a key role in ousting several Republican congressmen in Orange County in 2018, a longstanding GOP stronghold in a state that has become very liberal in recent decades.

The fact that millions of unused mail-in ballots are floating around in every election cycle “is not a secret type data here – it's sitting there on the Internet, and you're paying for the server cost,” notes Logan Churchwell, a spokesman for PILF. “So what do people that really focus on the election process do about that? They go into ballot harvesting. If there's so many ballots out there in the wind unaccounted for by election officials, surely some manpower could be dedicated to go bring them in. And that's another part of the system where you have weaknesses and risk.”

To illustrate the risk, Churchwell notes that in 2016 Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by garnering over 2.8 million more votes than Donald Trump. But nearly 6 million unaccounted mail-in ballots were never counted in 2016, more than twice her margin in the popular vote. The potential to affect elections by chasing down unused mail-in ballots and make sure they get counted – using methods that may or may not be legal – is great.

There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud. A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots “is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time.” According to a Wall Street Journal report on voter exploitation in Hispanic communities in Texas, mail-in ballots have “spawned a mini-industry of consultants who get out the absentee vote, sometimes using questionable techniques.” Poor, elderly, and minority communities are most likely to be preyed upon by so-called ballot “brokers.”

Concerns about fraud in mail-in ballots were serious enough that a 2008 report produced by the CalTech/MIT Voting Technology Project recommended that states “restrict or abolish on-demand absentee voting in favor of in-person early voting.”

“The convenience that on-demand absentees produces is bought at a significant cost to the real and perceived integrity of the voting process,” the report added. “On the face of it, early voting can provide nearly equal convenience with significantly greater controls against fraud and coercion.” Similarly, another academic study done in 2008 from Reed College flagged various concerns related to absentee voting and conceded there is a “great deal of literature on turnout” but when it comes to mail-in ballots there is “a dearth of research on campaign effects, election costs, ballot quality, and the risk of fraud.”

Despite these concerns, five states – Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii – now do all elections exclusively by mail. Supporters point to smooth elections in these states as proof that it works. But PILF obtained voter data from Oregon, the first state to adopt voting by mail exclusively, for the 2012 and 2018 elections and checked it against census data. Of the 7 million ballots the state sent out in those two elections, some 871,000 ballots are totally unaccounted for.

Losing only one of eight ballots, as opposed to the national average of one in five, may be the result of Oregon having a more accurate listing of voters’ addresses than many other states, but that’s still a very high percentage of missing ballots, and Oregon would not reveal its data for the 2014 and 2016 elections for reasons the state would not disclose.

Regardless, U.S. Census data confirms that 11% of Americans move every year, and voters on the lower end of the economic scale are especially transient. Without implementing some extensive, and likely problematic, government surveillance program, there’s no way for election administrators to reliably get ballots to tens of millions of Americans every election cycle without a large percentage of ballots going to the wrong address. This problem is compounded by states that mail ballots automatically. (The author of this piece is from Oregon, where ballots with his name on them were sent to his parents’ address for years after he graduated from college and moved out of state -- despite repeated contacts with the county clerk telling them he had moved.)

The inherent problems of mail-in voting are being widely ignored, however. Use of mail-in ballots more than doubled from 24.9 million in 2004 to 57.2 million in 2016, and around 40% of U.S. votes are now done by mail. Along with this dramatic increase there have been virtually no new safeguards, scrutiny, or additional research on the risks of vote by mail. If the current pandemic is going to force the issue during a presidential election, proponents of voting by mail may have to address obvious risks that come with proposing that more than 200 million ballots be mailed out this fall.

“I really think the only reason vote-by-mail problems are not getting more attention on a regular basis, is that it's kind of an embarrassing problem and people just aren’t paying attention,” says Churchwell. “These numbers of missing ballots demonstrate large voter list maintenance failures and security gaps within the broader mail voting process.

NY mail-in voting was a massive failure – ballots with no dates count
By M. Dowling -August 4, 2020

https://www.independentsentinel.com/ny-mail-in-voting-was-a-massive-failure-ballots-with-no-dates-count/

Over 80,000 mail-in ballots disqualified in NYC primary mess
By Carl Campanile, Nolan Hicks and Bernadette Hogan, August 5, 2020 | 6:53pm

The mail-in ballots of more than 84,000 New York City Democrats who sought to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified, according to new figures released by the Board of Elections.

The city BOE received 403,213 mail-in ballots for the June 23 Democratic presidential primary.

But the certified results released Wednesday revealed that only 318,995 mail-in ballots were counted.

That’s means 84,208 ballots were not counted or invalidated — 26 percent of the total.

One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone.

The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order to make it easier to vote by mail-in or absentee ballot. The state also footed the bill by providing pre-paid envelopes for voters to mail the ballots.

“A 26 percent invalidation rate is astounding. It’s very troubling,” said Arthur Schwartz, who represented several candidates in a federal lawsuit claiming voters were disenfranchised over the BOE and Postal Service’s handling of ballots..

A federal judge ruled Monday that thousands of voters were disenfranchised because of the tardy mailing and processing of the ballots.

The mess included votes not being counted because the prep-paid ballots were not post-marked.

Manhattan Judge Analisa Torres ordered that ballots received by June 25 be counted, though the state Board of Election said it is appealing the ruling.

Aside from tardy mailings and processing, Schwartz said scores of ballots were tossed out because the voters failed to sign the interior envelope that came with it.

But he said it wasn’t the voters’ fault.

“The envelope with directions for the signature was so poorly designed,” Schwartz said.

Doug Kellner, co-chair of the state Board of Elections, agreed with the criticism.

“The invalidation rate is higher than I would have predicted,” Kellor told The Post.

Meanwhile the embattled BOE found itself in hot mired in controversy again after emails obtained by The Post show the agency blew off Kellner, who proposed reforms to prevent another absentee balloting nightmare in November.

His six-page proposal urged city BOE officials to ensure proper staffing at polling places during the November election to ensure lines are no longer than 30 minutes; to tally absentee ballots more quickly than the six weeks it took to certify results from the primary; and to plan for processing “double or triple” the number of absentee applications.

“Add new capacity to process the applications in a timely manner now. Do not wait for a backlog from which you can never recover,” Kellner said.

City lawyers admitted in Manhattan federal court last week that they were still mailing absentee ballots the day before the June primary, leaving little chance they could reach voters in time.

Kellner’s memorandum even suggested that city election administrators should apologize for the mess.

“To those voters who did not have an opportunity to cast their ballots in the primary election, we should apologize for not doing more,” he wrote. “Elected officials and others warned that we were not deploying sufficient resources to mail out absentee ballots in a timely manner, and in hindsight, we could have done more to address the problem.”

Over 80,000 mail-in ballots disqualified in NYC primary mess
By Carl Campanile, Nolan Hicks and Bernadette Hogan, August 5, 2020 | 6:53pm

The mail-in ballots of more than 84,000 New York City Democrats who sought to vote in the presidential primary were disqualified, according to new figures released by the Board of Elections.

The city BOE received 403,213 mail-in ballots for the June 23 Democratic presidential primary.

But the certified results released Wednesday revealed that only 318,995 mail-in ballots were counted.

That’s means 84,208 ballots were not counted or invalidated — 26 percent of the total.

One out of four mail-in ballots were disqualified for arriving late, lacking a postmark or failing to include a voter’s signature, or other defects. The Post reported Tuesday that roughly 30,000 mail-in ballots were invalidated in Brooklyn alone.

The high invalidation rate provides more proof that election officials and the Postal Service were woefully underprepared to handle and process the avalanche of mail-in ballots that voters were encouraged to fill out to avoid having to go the polls during the coronavirus pandemic, critics said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order to make it easier to vote by mail-in or absentee ballot. The state also footed the bill by providing pre-paid envelopes for voters to mail the ballots.

“A 26 percent invalidation rate is astounding. It’s very troubling,” said Arthur Schwartz, who represented several candidates in a federal lawsuit claiming voters were disenfranchised over the BOE and Postal Service’s handling of ballots..

A federal judge ruled Monday that thousands of voters were disenfranchised because of the tardy mailing and processing of the ballots.

The mess included votes not being counted because the prep-paid ballots were not post-marked.

Manhattan Judge Analisa Torres ordered that ballots received by June 25 be counted, though the state Board of Election said it is appealing the ruling.

Aside from tardy mailings and processing, Schwartz said scores of ballots were tossed out because the voters failed to sign the interior envelope that came with it.

But he said it wasn’t the voters’ fault.

“The envelope with directions for the signature was so poorly designed,” Schwartz said.

Doug Kellner, co-chair of the state Board of Elections, agreed with the criticism.

“The invalidation rate is higher than I would have predicted,” Kellor told The Post.

Meanwhile the embattled BOE found itself in hot mired in controversy again after emails obtained by The Post show the agency blew off Kellner, who proposed reforms to prevent another absentee balloting nightmare in November.

His six-page proposal urged city BOE officials to ensure proper staffing at polling places during the November election to ensure lines are no longer than 30 minutes; to tally absentee ballots more quickly than the six weeks it took to certify results from the primary; and to plan for processing “double or triple” the number of absentee applications.

“Add new capacity to process the applications in a timely manner now. Do not wait for a backlog from which you can never recover,” Kellner said.

City lawyers admitted in Manhattan federal court last week that they were still mailing absentee ballots the day before the June primary, leaving little chance they could reach voters in time.

Kellner’s memorandum even suggested that city election administrators should apologize for the mess.

“To those voters who did not have an opportunity to cast their ballots in the primary election, we should apologize for not doing more,” he wrote. “Elected officials and others warned that we were not deploying sufficient resources to mail out absentee ballots in a timely manner, and in hindsight, we could have done more to address the problem.”

Las Vegas: Over 223K Mail-In Ballots Bounced as ‘Undeliverable’ in Recent Primary Election
JOHN BINDER5 Aug 20202

More than 223,000 mail-in ballots sent to registered voters in Clark County, Nevada, were bounced as “undeliverable” in the state’s June primary election, newly released data reveals.

According to data collected by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) from the Clark County Election Department, a total of 223,469 mail-in ballots sent to registered voters for the June 9 primary election ended up bouncing as “undeliverable” — 17 percent of the total 1,325,934 mail-in ballots that were sent out in the county.

“These numbers show how vote by mail fails,” PILF President J. Christian Adams said in a statement, adding:

New proponents of mail balloting don’t often understand how it actually works. States like Oregon and Washington spent many years building their mail voting systems and are notably aggressive with voter list maintenance efforts. Pride in their own systems does not somehow transfer across state lines. Nevada, New York, and others are not and will not be ready for November.

For comparison, in the 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018 general elections, the entire state of Nevada recorded just 5,863 mail-in ballots as “undeliverable.” That data comes from U.S. Election Assistance Commission surveys.








The data find that of those “undeliverable” mail ballots, 58 percent were from inactive voters and 42 percent were from active voters. Put another way, 92,337 were listed as Democrats and 53,129 are Republicans.

Clark County, which went more than 52 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016, sent out mail-in ballots to all registered voters for their primary election — unlike other counties, including Washoe, in the state’s northwest corner.

Washoe County sent out a little more than a fifth of the mail-in ballots that Clark County sent for the primary election and saw far fewer “undeliverables,” less than 28,000. Unlike Las Vegas, Reno officials did not send ballots to “inactive” voters.

The revelation comes as Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) signed legislation to send mail-in ballots to all active registered voters for the 2020 presidential election.

On Wednesday, President Trump said Nevada did not have the election infrastructure to take on such a task as universal mail-in voting.

Trump wrote in a post:

Nevada has ZERO infrastructure for Mail-In Voting. It will be a corrupt disaster if not ended by the Courts. It will take months, or years, to figure out. Florida has built a great infrastructure, over years, with two great Republican Governors. Florida, send in your Ballots!

Recent data has not shown a compelling public health justification for mail-in voting. In Wisconsin’s April election, only 52 of more than 400,000 voters and poll workers were confirmed to have contracted the Chinese coronavirus. None of those cases were fatal. This equals an infection rate below two-hundredths of one percent.

California tosses 100,000 botched mailed-in ballots for presidential primary
Most of the discounted votes arrived late, while others were lacking signatures.
July 14, 2020, 5:54 AM MDT / Updated July 14, 2020, 5:59 AM MDT
By Associated Press

LOS ANGELES — More than 100,000 mail-in ballots were rejected by California election officials during the March presidential primary, according to data obtained by The Associated Press that highlights a glaring gap in the state’s effort to ensure every vote is counted.

With the coronavirus pandemic raging, California is part of a growing number of states increasing mail-in balloting to avoid crowds at polling places. President Donald Trump is among those questioning the integrity of vote-by-mail elections while supporters say they are just as reliable as polling places and offer greater flexibility for voters.

But while polling places include workers who can assist people who have questions about filling out ballots, a voter doesn’t have support at home and so problems can arise.

The California secretary of state’s election data obtained by the AP showed 102,428 mail-in ballots were disqualified in the state’s 58 counties, about 1.5% of the nearly 7 million mail-in ballots returned. That percentage is the highest in a primary since 2014, and the overall number is the highest in a statewide election since 2010.

Two years ago, the national average of rejected mail ballots in the general election was about 1.4% and in the 2016 presidential election year it was 1%, according to a U.S. Election Assistance Commission study.

The most common problem, by far, in California was missing the deadline for the ballot to be mailed and arrive. To count in the election, ballots must be postmarked on or before Election Day and received within three days afterward. Statewide, 70,330 ballots missed those marks.

Another 27,525 either didn’t have a signature, or the signature didn’t match the one on record for the voter.

Kim Alexander, president of the nonpartisan California Voter Foundation that seeks to improve elections, called the uncounted figure discouraging.

“The only thing worse than people not voting is people attempting to vote and having their ballot uncounted,” she said. The tally of nullified votes “can make a difference in a close contest.”

The data didn’t break down the uncounted ballots by party registration. While the overall number was large in March, if it’s the same in November it’s unlikely to affect the presidential race — Trump lost to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 by 4.3 million votes.

But there are expected to be at least several tightly contested U.S. House races where a relatively few votes could tip the balance. In 2018, Democrat TJ Cox upset Republican David Valadao by less than 1,000 votes in a Central Valley district. They have a rematch in November.

Local races sometimes are decided by a handful of votes.

California traditionally has offered mail-in voting only to those who request ballots. Over time the number has grown to represent more than half of all cast ballots. In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in June signed a law requiring county election officials to mail a ballot to all the state’s nearly 21 million registered voters for the November election.

Trump says Florida can provide accurate vote-by-mail results because of its Republican governors
He called mail-in voting safe and secure, pointing to a series of studies that found no evidence of significant fraud. States across the political spectrum rely solely on mail ballots, including Colorado, Utah and Washington.

In preparation for November, the state is launching a ballot-tracking tool that will quickly alert voters if they need to take action, such as adding a missing signature. Another change: The state is extending the window for mail ballots to arrive to 17 days after Election Day.

Even though he voted by mail this year, Trump has called mail-in voting “a terrible thing” prone to abuse, warning without evidence that “you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place.”

With the COVID-19 pandemic prompting many states to pursue near-universal mail voting to minimize health risks that come with indoor crowds, national Republicans and Democrats have argued over the safety and security of votes traveling through the U.S. Postal Service.

Washington’s Republican Secretary of State, Kim Wyman, is among those who see it as a safe system. So does Alex Padilla, California’s Democratic secretary of state, who says there is “no safer ... way to exercise your right to vote than from the safety and convenience of your own home.”

Research by Alexander’s group has found that an average of nearly two of every 100 mail-in ballots were voided in statewide elections between 2010 and 2018. However, over that time, the rate of disqualification has improved, dropping from over 140,000 ballots, or 2.9% in the 2010 general election, to 84,825 ballots, or 1%, in 2018.

Last March, the highest rejection rate in California was in San Francisco, where 9,407 ballots, or nearly 5% of the total, were set aside, mostly because they did not arrive on time. By contrast, in rural Plumas County northeast of Sacramento, all of the 8,207 mail-in ballots received were accepted.

In Los Angeles County, nearly 2,800 ballots were nullified because the voter forgot to sign it, then couldn’t be found to fix the error. Statewide, that careless mistake spiked nearly 13,000 ballots.

More than 1,000 ballots were disqualified in Fresno County because the signature didn’t match the one on file with election officials. The same problem nixed over 1,300 ballots in San Diego County — and over 14,000 statewide. In some of those cases, voting experts say, a family member might have signed for others in the household, which is illegal.

Some voters apparently filled out their ballots then left them on the kitchen table: In more than 800 instances, envelopes were returned to election officials without the marked ballot inside.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley said ultimately a voter has the responsibility to fill out the ballot correctly and get it in the mail on time. Sometimes, “it’s just a product of voters forgetting,” Kelley said.

It's way too early to vote for Biden, Temple. You wasted your ballot.

The Wise And Powerful wrote:

It's way too early to vote for Biden, Temple. You wasted your ballot.

I would vote for a pizza guy before I'd ever give a vote to a mentally challenged guy with zero knowledge of the constitution and totally unqualified to lead this great country..
I'd say; that HUGE numbers of ballots cast just today were for Bidden.

'It's a mess': Paterson voter fraud just a taste of mail-in ballot issues plaguing New Jersey

https://www.njherald.com/news/20200630/its-mess-paterson-voter-fraud-just-taste-of-mail-in-ballot-issues-plaguing-new-jersey
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Nevada Sent More Than 200K Mail-In Primary Ballots to Wrong Addresses
One-sixth of Clark County mail-in ballots were sent to outdated or undeliverable addresses

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/nevada-sent-more-than-200k-mail-in-primary-ballots-to-wrong-addresses/
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Michigan Rejects 846 Mail-In Ballots From Dead Voters

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2020/08/15/michigan-rejects-846-mail-in-ballots-from-dead-voters-n796410
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California rejected 100K mail-in ballots because of mistakes

https://apnews.com/a45421048cd89938df7c882891a97db5
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Absentee ballots didn't get counted because of late delivery, misdelivery and bad postmarks, post office says

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/10/wisconsin-absentee-ballots-didnt-get-counted-because-late-delivery-misdelivery-and-bad-postmarks-pos/5417084002/
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Dead cat gets voter registration

https://twitter.com/WyattDobrovich/status/1281632285922656256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1281632285922656256%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.citizenfreepress.com%2Fcolumn-1%2Fdead-cat-gets-voter-registration-application-in-the-mail%2F
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https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/04/21/15-election-results-that-were-thrown-out-because-of-fraudulent-mail-in-ballots/

15 Election Results That Were Thrown Out Because of Fraudulent Mail-In Ballots
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https://www.citizenfreepress.com/breaking/postal-worker-dumps-gop-mailers-in-dumpster-caught-on-video/

A US Postal worker was just caught on video throwing a stack of my campaign mailers in a dumpster. Some patriots nearby heard a noise when she tossed them in & went to investigate. They found a stack of them and called me. No wonder people are skeptical of mail in voting.

When and how to vote in all 50 states

https://www.axios.com/how-to-vote-by-state-2020-307c3d17-ee57-4a1b-8bad-182ca1cdb752.html





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