Confessions of a Democratic Voting Fraudster!

Anonymous bullshit from the New York Post.

The New York Post‘s Saturday-only writer Jon Levine posted 11 stories at the paper’s website yesterday. That’s about par for the course. The one that stuck out, though, was the one titled “Confessions of a voter fraud: I was a master at fixing mail-in ballots.” It’s a real stem-winder.

A top Democratic operative says voter fraud, especially with mail-in ballots, is no myth. And he knows this because he’s been doing it, on a grand scale, for decades.

Mail-in ballots have become the latest flashpoint in the 2020 elections. While President Trump and the GOP warn of widespread manipulation of the absentee vote that will swell with COVID polling restrictions, many Democrats and their media allies have dismissed such concerns as unfounded.

But the political insider, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears prosecution, said fraud is more the rule than the exception. His dirty work has taken him through the weeds of municipal and federal elections in Paterson, Atlantic City, Camden, Newark, Hoboken and Hudson County and his fingerprints can be found in local legislative, mayoral and congressional races across the Garden State. Some of the biggest names and highest office holders in New Jersey have benefited from his tricks, according to campaign records The Post reviewed.

“An election that is swayed by 500 votes, 1,000 votes — it can make a difference,” the tipster said. “It could be enough to flip states.”

The whisteblower — whose identity, rap sheet and long history working as a consultant to various campaigns were confirmed by The Post — says he not only changed ballots himself over the years, but led teams of fraudsters and mentored at least 20 operatives in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania — a critical 2020 swing state.

“There is no race in New Jersey — from City Council to United States Senate — that we haven’t worked on,” the tipster said. “I worked on a fire commissioner’s race in Burlington County. The smaller the race the easier it is to do.”

A Bernie Sanders die-hard with no horse in the presidential race, he said he felt compelled to come forward in the hope that states would act now to fix the glaring security problems present in mail-in ballots.

“This is a real thing,” he said. “And there is going to be a f-king war coming November 3rd over this stuff … If they knew how the sausage was made, they could fix it.”

Do you believe any of this? Because I don’t.

There are teams of fraudsters! At least 20 of them, anyway. And they’re fraudstering all our elections! And this guy, a Sanders supporter, is suddenly worried about it. Because it would help defeat Donald Trump? Really?

If he has a “rap sheet,” you think we’d have heard about it before now? After all, Trump and others have been pointing without evidence to voter fraud for years.

And this just doesn’t make any sense:

The ballot has no specific security features — like a stamp or a watermark — so the insider said he would just make his own ballots.

“I just put [the ballot] through the copy machine and it comes out the same way,” the insider said.

But the return envelopes are “more secure than the ballot. You could never recreate the envelope,” he said. So they had to be collected from real voters.

Doesn’t that strike you as backwards? If the ballot is just a piece of ordinary copy paper that can be replicated, that’s a problem, indeed. But the same folks who send out ridiculously-easy-to-fraudster ballots are also using some sort of stealthy, impossible-to-fraudster envelopes? That makes no sense whatsoever.

He would have his operatives fan out, going house-to-house, convincing voters to let them mail completed ballots on their behalf as a public service. The fraudster and his minions would then take the sealed envelopes home and hold them over boiling water.

“You have to steam it to loosen the glue,” said the insider.

He then would remove the real ballot, place the counterfeit ballot inside the signed certificate, and reseal the envelope.

“Five minutes per ballot tops,” said the insider.

These fraudsters apparently learned their tradecraft by watching Lucille Ball reruns.

So . . . to get envelopes, they’re going to random strangers and convincing them to let them have their sealed ballots. To mail them. As a public service. Nobody has called the police or anything like that.

But some 180,000 readers are being peddled this bullshit.

FILED UNDER: 2020 Election, Media, Policing, US Politics, , , , , , , ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. de stijl says:

    If any of this is true it needs to be addressed and corrected and stopped now.

    Likely, it is hand wave partisan bullshit.

    Likely, made up full cloth.

    But here’s the real deal – if it is true I want that practice to be shut down and prosecuted.

    This looks like, smells like, feels like a transparent ploy to negate votes cast by mail for partisan purpose.

    But if dude has a true source with a valid claim, it must be addressed.

    Bring the proof.

    I just now got his aim. He is using our sense of justice and fairness against us.

    If he just made it up – fuck him to hell.

    6
  2. Neil Hudelson says:

    I worked on campaigns in most of the places this anonymous-definitely-not-made-up person claims to have worked, and i can tell you that if there was an easy, open-secret method to harvesting mail in ballots, i would have heard of it.
    -My campaign managers would have tried to hire people to do some frauding themselves.
    -We would have hired teams of canvassers to find these fraudsters so we could make ads and mailers about the fraud.
    -we would have flagged this very open secret of Democrat ballot harvesting to the Republican governor who was preparing to run for President.

    Here are some of the things I witnessed in my few years of Jersey politics:
    -Assault–throwing m80s and other legal-but-dangerous fireworks into the cars of opponents operatives.
    -fake kidnapping one of our own employees and stapling our flyers to his head to make it look like an action by the other guys.
    -Attempts to lock our campaign team into our offices (barred the double doors and emergency exits with broomsticks and chains) to prevent us from canvassing.
    -straight up brawls.

    What i haven’t seen:
    -voter fraud.

    26
  3. Jax says:

    This is also making the rounds on Facebook as another “proof positive” that mail-in voting isn’t safe. I mean, if she could do it to immigration papers, why not ballots?! None of them seem concerned with what a racist beeyotch this postal service employee must be. (eyeroll)

    https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/former-slc-post-office-employee-accused-of-destroying-immigration-documents-since-2017

  4. OzarkHillbilly says:

    Absentee votes have always had the weakness of con artists being able to convince folks that “they will take care of it for them”. I know of 2 recent cases: Leslie McCrae Dowless in N Carolina,

    Leslie McCrae Dowless was charged Tuesday with two counts of felony obstruction of justice, perjury, solicitation to commit perjury, conspiracy to obstruct justice and illegal possession of absentee ballots, according to a statement by Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman.

    The charges relate to the tainted 9th congressional district election last year in which Republican Mark Harris led in the unofficial vote tally by a margin of about 900 votes over Democrat Dan McCready. But the election results were overturned by the state after an investigation into an absentee ballot operation on Harris’ behalf suggested that Dowless had improperly collected and possibly tampered with ballots.

    and the Hubbard family in South STL:

    Widespread abuse” of the absentee balloting system may have helped the Hubbard family build its political dynasty, a lawyer alleges in an explosive letter filed today with the Board of Elections.

    Attorney Dave Roland, who represents three progressive candidates challenging members of the St. Louis family on Democratic Party primary ballots next month, alleges that past races featuring a Hubbard on the ballot have generated a “quite literally unbelievable” percentage of absentee ballots. He’s demanding that the city’s Board of Elections step in to monitor absentee balloting in those three races in light of the “extreme irregularities” he’s identified.

    The letter, hand-delivered to the Board today, lays out Roland’s case that absentee ballots comprise far too high a percentage of votes in races involving the family. Absentee ballots are only allowed in St. Louis elections under limited circumstances, including disability or incarceration.

    And Roland’s analysis shows that the absentee ballots — notched in higher-than-average numbers — have subsquently broken by huge margins for various Hubbards. In two different elections he analyzed, in fact, 95 percent of absentee ballots in a given precinct went to State Rep. Penny Hubbard (D-St. Louis) or Alderwoman Tammika Hubbard. In other races and other precincts he analyzed, Hubbards consistently won more than 70 percent of the absentee ballots, a much higher percentage than their performance at regular polling stations.
    …………………………….
    And, Roland notes, “the percentage of absentee ballots being cast tends to plummet whenever a Hubbard is not up for election.”

    “My clients are concerned that these statistics indicate widespread abuse of the absentee voting process in St. Louis City, and that this abuse seems systematically to favor members of the Hubbard family,” Roland writes.

    As far as I can tell, none of the Hubbards nor anyone associated with their campaigns were ever charged with voter fraud, but Bruce Franks was able to get Penny Hubbard’s primary victory vacated and she lost in the redo. From what I remember reading in the aftermath, they had quite the operation.

    Even with all that, to think anyone could scale up such an operation enough to influence a national election is ludicrous. It is one thing to steal an aldermanic or state delegate race where the numbers are far more manageable, but I find it highly unlikely anyone could do it in a state wide race and even in a congressional race such as the one where McDowless got caught with his hand in the cookie jar is difficult to do.

    2
  5. James Joyner says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: It’s been my longstanding hypothesis that mail-in voting was susceptible to fraud. But doing what’s described here is madness: high risk for low reward. It would be far easier for, say, pastors or nursing home leaders (precise terminology fails me) to essentially coerce significant numbers of people under their sway to let them fill out their ballots for them. Done in enough scale, that could be influential. And quite possibly be legal.

    Even this, though, doesn’t strike me as something we should be terribly worried about compared to the obvious advantages of making voting more convenient.

    4
  6. Mr. Iron Knee says:

    The skepticism is ironic considering you all believed Vladimir Putin was holding Donald Trump politically hostage with a pee tape in a hotel bed Barack Obama slept in.

    5
  7. HarvardLaw92 says:

    Questionable, but if it could happen anywhere, it would be Jersey.

    There is one nugget that rings true though – the ballots can’t be identifiable by person, I believe, but the envelopes are uniquely bar coded

    2
  8. Sleeping Dog says:

    That should be nominated for the Nobel prize for fiction.

    5
  9. Sleeping Dog says:

    The biggest logic hole in these purported vote by mail fraud schemes is the logistics for carrying them out.

    2
  10. de stijl says:

    If it is provable, prevent it and punish those that exploit it.

    But prove it. This is hearsay that looks like to specifically to promote mail vote fraud allegations.

    I am really close to declaring “Shenanigans” on this.

    4
  11. gVOR08 says:

    he said he felt compelled to come forward in the hope that states would act now to fix the glaring security problems present in mail-in ballots.

    64 days before the election he’s motivated by a desire to see the states make changes?Actually, I don’t doubt there’s been some level of fraud, particularly in NJ. But NJ isn’t exactly a swing state.

  12. Han says:

    The one part of this that I believe is that it’s coming from a Bernie Sanders die-hard with no horse in the presidential race. There are still many idiots on the left who think four more years of Trump will finally heighten the contradictions enough to get a true leftist into the presidency.

    6
  13. An Interested Party says:

    The skepticism is ironic considering you all believed Vladimir Putin was holding Donald Trump politically hostage with a pee tape in a hotel bed Barack Obama slept in.

    Actually, what many people around here believe is that Putin wanted/wants Trump to win the White House, that he is much more preferable to the Russian dictator than the Democratic nominee and there is plenty of solid evidence to back this up…none of this is controversial nor unbelievable nor fantastic…but you go ahead trying to muddy the waters by talking about the pee tape…next, tell us how the Obama Administration committed treason by spying illegally on the Trump campaign and how all the indictments will be coming out any day now…

    6
  14. Mister Bluster says:

    Apparently Mr. Knee Capp had his surgery paid for by the Republican replacement of Obamacare.

    2
  15. Joe says:

    @OzarkHillbilly: As I recall the Dowless case, the Republicans were “harvesting” ballots in Democratic neighborhoods and round filing them, not changing them. I believe that sort of ballot harvesting is done for legitimate and illegitimate reasons in a number of states, some of which have rules intended to control it. Round filing v. changing are two very different issues as far as difficulty.

    1
  16. Neil Hudelson says:

    @Mister Bluster:

    I assumed his name was referring to how calloused his knees are after kneeling in front of Trump for so long.

    6
  17. Han says:

    I also believe anyone who thinks mass steaming open of envelopes undetected is a viable strategy has never actually tried to steam open an envelope.

    And I have no knowledge of New Jersey ballots, but in my state they’re not 8.5×11 20lb bond, they’re heavier and odd size. Not saying it’s not possible, but you can’t go to any old copier and just start making ballots. It takes a bit more planning than that.

    3
  18. Pylon says:

    I’ve never understood why people think that fraud using individual mail in ballots (or individual in person votes via lack of ID) is an effective means to rig an election versus, say, manipulating electronic voting machines that tally thousands of votes.

    9
  19. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @Han: Steaming open an envelope is relatively easy compared to resealing it in a manner that doesn’t reveal that it was steamed open in the first place. Paper has a sort of a safety feature–when it’s exposed to moisture, it becomes swollen and wrinkly.

    8
  20. Gustopher says:

    I would encourage the relevant House committees to extend a subpoena to this anonymous person, through the NY Post, with an offer of immunity.

    If there is fraud, we should find it, prosecute it, and ensure that it cannot happen again.

    If this is bullshit, we should expose that.

    8
  21. Gustopher says:

    @Neil Hudelson: I don’t know which is worse, the casual anti-gay tones of your comment or the slut-shaming.

    1
  22. Michael Cain says:

    @Han:

    And I have no knowledge of New Jersey ballots, but in my state they’re not 8.5×11 20lb bond, they’re heavier and odd size. Not saying it’s not possible, but you can’t go to any old copier and just start making ballots. It takes a bit more planning than that.

    IIRC, the 2002 HAVA law included requirements for weight, finish, and brightness of paper ballots. Anyone could buy such paper, but it’s not common. Then as you say, cut to specific size. My vote-by-mail state has alignment standards for the printing, and there are relatively few printers that can meet them consistently. There are bar codes on the ballot identifying the election, ballot type, and page number that would be have to be copied correctly. Our ballots are machine folded, which is quite distinct compared to hand folding. Envelopes that show any evidence of tampering are pulled out for special handling. In my largish county, I understand that the machine scanning the envelopes is quite good at seeing that sort of resealing. Any pattern in tampered envelopes, fake ballots — say, a bunch of households all in one area — would be big news. That it’s not being reported is a very strong indicator that it’s not happening.

    James’s concern at 10:27 is legitimate, but… doing it at any sort of scale makes it much more likely that something will go wrong and there will be an investigation that catches the perpetrators. It’s a big risk to take for a very tiny reward. That’s true about voter fraud in general: “retail” fraud is just not worth it. Wholesale fraud — say, poll watchers that challenge hundreds of voters for no real reason and drive away enough people — is much easier and effective.

    3
  23. CSK says:

    @Just nutha ignint cracker:
    I got a funny mental image of an assembly line of people holding envelopes over steaming kettles–and jumping back and swearing when the steam burned their hands.

    2
  24. Monala says:

    @Gustopher: he could have been referring to a**-kissing rather than any sexual acts.

  25. Gustopher says:

    @Monala: Hard to kiss ass when kneeling in front of someone, and analingus is a sex act. Kids these days call it “tossing the salad.” Closest some of them get to green leafy vegetables.

    1
  26. Just nutha ignint cracker says:

    @CSK: So did I. 😛 😀

    1
  27. Raoul says:

    Nice catch JJ! I would not have paid that much attention to the article but watching how you dissected it was quite good. Very convincing indeed how each point that was made smells like manure (especially the boiling water- LOL!).

    1
  28. flat earth luddite says:

    at least out here in Oregon, we’ve had vote by mail for decades. Our ballot comes in the mail. We complete it in the comfort of our homes, cars, patios, where ever. After completion of the ballot, we use a secure liner which obstructs what’s marked on the ballot. We then sign the outside of the envelope we return. Then we either mail it in the postage prepaid envelope, or drop it in a locked (mailbox type container) at our local state, county, or city office. In the 35+ years I’ve lived in Oregon, I can’t think of more than a handful (if that many) confirmed voter fraud incidents. The entire Post article sounds like pure hogwash to me.

    2
  29. Neil Hudelson says:

    @Gustopher:
    I meant it to be intentionally vague–worshiping him, or fellating him. I didn’t think of ass kissing but that works too.

    As to the accusations.
    Pointing out someone worships someone else so much that they would perform oral sex on them is not “slut shaming.” It’s highlighting their slobbering devotion.

    My understanding of “slut shaming” is insulting someone–almost always a woman–simply because they enjoy sex or are sexually active. I also see it used when someone holds a woman up to a societal norm that isn’t applied to a woman (“play boy” vs. “slut.”)

    I wasn’t trying to say that he would fellate Mr. Trump because he enjoys sex too much, and enjoying sex is a bad thing. I was saying he would fellate Mr. Trump because he would willingly do absolutely anything Trump asked of him, even if it is a degrading act. (And just to be clear, the act of fellating is fine. Doing it because you worship an authoritarian is sad.)

    As to it being anti-gay, I get why you say that, but in this case the gender of the two parties is incidental. I don’t care about the sexual act itself, or the gender, it’s the debasement.

    A lazy joke, sure, but I don’t think your accusations are on the mark.

    7
  30. An Interested Party says:

    @Neil Hudelson: Perhaps this person would be on his knees licking Trump’s lift enhanced shoes…

  31. Gustopher says:

    @Neil Hudelson:

    A lazy joke, sure, but I don’t think your accusations are on the mark.

    A lazy joke that relies upon the depravity of homosexuals for its punch line. I call ‘em like I see ‘em. Probably not meant with malice, but still depending on that malice existing.

    As a queer kid growing up in the 80’s, pretty firmly in the closet, I remember a lot of those lame jokes, generally told without specific malice. I made them myself, to fit in and just because I had heard them so often that they were part of the common vernacular.

    At least, I made those lame jokes when I didn’t have my mouth full of cock. So, like half the time.

    1
  32. Ken Lovell says:

    But some 180,000 readers are being peddled this bullshit.

    It’s much worse than that. Trumpropaganda webites like Townhall have already written up the story as if it’s gospel truth from the Christian Science Monitor. It will be linked in countless posts between now and election day as ‘proof’ of the massive mail-in voter fraud being perpetrated by Democrats.

    1
  33. Bob@Youngstown says:

    The “tipster” was doing this for decades either for fun or profit. My bet is on profit.
    But now he says:

    he said he felt compelled to come forward in the hope that states would act now to fix

    Sure sounds like he wants his profit curtailed.
    Sure, that makes a lot of sense. /s/

    I call BS on the whole story.

    2
  34. Mr. Iron Knee says:

    @An Interested Party: “Pee Tape Party” and its adherents spent three years insisting on decisive proof of coLlUsSiOn now insists I shake my fist angrily at Putin for not wanting to deal with Hillary Clinton. The NERVE of him.

  35. Mr. Iron Knee says:

    @Mister Bluster: At least they left my brain intact, unlike what the Pee Tape Party did to yours. ☹️

  36. Mr. Iron Knee says:

    @Neil Hudelson: Thankfully, knees can develop callouses! But, there’s nothing that can be done about your very-wide anal cavity.

  37. iamyuneek says:
  38. gomisaburo says:

    Liberals become experts on hearsay when it’s convenient. How convenient is that?

  39. Jeff Ryan says:

    @Mr. Iron Knee: Who are “we all”?