...by republicans, of course.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/politics/north-carolina-vote-fraud.html
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-north-carolina/house-race-in-limbo-after-north-carolina-voter-fraud-claims-idUSKCN1NZ2T2
There are a lot of articles calling it voter fraud, but I feel election fraud is more fitting.
I knew NC, much like Georgia and Florida, is ground zero for shiesty right wing vote suppression tactics, but WOW, what was described in those articles is most definitely straight up "voter fraud".
I always thought election manipulators typically avoid real "voter fraud" because it's seriously the most inefficient means of affecting the outcome while carrying the greatest risks; the penalty if you're caught is pretty fierce. An organized effort to steal and fill out other voters absentee ballots to effect an outcome sounds REALLY labor intensive while leaving fingerprints all over it. I just figured vote suppression tactics like roll purges and vote caging was the preferred way to do it.
But what's described in those articles sounds like actually straight up voter FRAUD of a right wing op, which is pretty remarkable.
There seems to be a lot more going on than mere voter fraud though. While those claims of filling out unfinished ballots may be true, it appears there was a serious mishandling of legitimate ballots by officials. It's looking like fraud on a multi-pronged level in both the general election and the republican primary. It sure is interesting how they all conveniently coalesced to help out Mr. Harris.
shareOfficials mishandling legitimate ballots for the purpose of misrepresentation is voter fraud and I hope they get max punishment. Yeah, this should be really interesting.
The pretext is that North Carolina Republicans are normally pretty good at using the law as the means to suppress the vote. Except now there's a Dem governor who campaigned on rolling back those NC suppression tactics and a 5-4 state Supreme Court decision (down partisan lines) to uphold a lawsuit filed by the governor when state GOP tried to seize control of the state elections boards from the governor's mansion. It sounds like NC GOP didn't have a legal channel available for them to exploit anymore so they resorted to this far clumsier and less optimal electioneering route that gives them far greater exposure.
They need to get nailed. Especially when their Supreme Court barely leans left there's actually a favorable environment towards them actually facing consequences.
Voter fraud involves either an illegitimate voter or a legitimate voter doing something illegitimate. The mishandling of ballots doesn't really have a term other than maybe "vote fraud." So if an official simply chooses to lose a bunch of ballots, no fraud was committed by a voter. It was committed by an official. I prefer election fraud in this case because it encompasses any type of fraud pertaining to an election. For example, all voter fraud is election fraud, but not all election fraud is voter fraud.
Please make no mistake. I believe there was plenty voter fraud in North Carolina. I'm just recognizing that that is only part of it, and it just might be the bigger part.
It's a pet peeve of mine because ten years ago I spent way too much effort explaining to people that ACORN was not guilty of voter fraud when they registered fake people to vote. Since there were no voters to show up and vote, there was no voter fraud.
"Mr. Wallace, in a letter to the state board on Thursday, raised the possibility that “serious irregularities and improprieties may have occurred.” He singled out rural Bladen County, which, he wrote, had the highest percentage of absentee ballot requests of any county in the state, 7.5 percent of all registered voters.
It also seemed unusual, he argued, that Mr. Harris received nearly 96 percent of Bladen County’s absentee-by-mail votes in the Republican primary, in which Mr. Harris narrowly upset Representative Robert Pittenger, a Republican who was first elected in 2012."
This appears to be the primary charge as appears in the Times article and what I was reacting to. What it sounds like is absentee ballots were requested en masse by some GOP operator, who voted in their stead. That's voter fraud.
I didn't see the part discussing the mishandling of ballots by officials.
"Dr. J. Michael Bitzer, a politics and history professor at Catawba College, near Charlotte, said it appeared odd that large numbers of requested absentee ballots in Bladen County and neighboring Robeson County were not returned: about 40 percent in Bladen, and 62 percent in Robeson.
“That says, ‘Well, people were either willing to request it but not carry through, or they requested it and something happened on the return — and we just don’t know which is which,” he said.
Included with the letter were several affidavits from Bladen County residents. One of them, Datesha Montgomery, said that she was visited by a young woman around late September who told Ms. Montgomery that she was collecting ballots. “I filled out two names of the ballot, Hakeem Brown for sheriff and Vice Rozier for board of election,” Ms. Montgomery wrote. “I gave her the ballot and she said she would finish it herself. I signed the ballot and she left. It was not sealed up at the time.”"
That last paragraph, especially, appears to insinuate either voter fraud or ballot mishandling. But like the paragraph in between them, it's hard to know which is which.
I don't see how any "ballot mishandling" insinuated in the last paragraph could imply anything but voter fraud. The implication is that this woman (either a real election official fraudulently misrepresenting her position and capacity, or an outright fraud altogether) deceptively collected her ballot for the purpose of misrepresenting her vote by taking advantage of her naivety that election officials actually go around collecting ballots before elections while she remain unaware of her requirement to mail it in or deposit at an official state drop herself.
I don't see any scenario in which that level of fraudulently misrepresenting state election protocol is merely 'mishandling' and doesn't amount to voter fraud.
There's also this:
"The North Carolina board is expected to look into accusations that people came to the doors of Bladen County voters ahead of the Nov. 6 vote and asked them to hand over ballots, sometimes unsealed and uncompleted. Filling out a ballot for another person, or destroying it, is illegal."
Filling out a ballot for another person is indeed voter fraud. Destroying it is something different, but both fit under election fraud.
Not really sure why you've even dragged this out. You can argue till you are blue in the face that every aspect of it is voter fraud. But what cannot be argued is that all of it is a form of election fraud, which is why I prefer that term over voter fraud.
This is getting more and more interesting by the hour...
Can republicans be any more obvious?
Election fraud.
Unlike the other BS claims about election fraud, this one has witnesses. This case has people on the record saying that they were paid to deliver ballots to an agent of the GOP candidate.
That agent is also a felon.
If there's a paper trail, it might be that the GOP candidate will bear that title "felon" too.
Yeah, the woman who went around collecting ballots said she gave them to McRae Dowless who has a criminal record.
That combined with a severely disproportionate number of ballot requests compared to how many were returned... it's not looking good and they might have to redo the whole thing.