WASHINGTON – Evidence of election fraud doesn't get much more arresting than video of it actually happening in the voting booth.
A video of what appeared to be either blatant vote fraud or the malfunctioning of a touch-screen voting machine appeared on social media Wednesday, just as similar reports emerged during early voting in Texas.
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But one of the nation's top election experts told WND there are even greater dangers to voting integrity than those that may be posed by any tampering of voting booth touch-screen machines, essentially accusing Democrats of doing everything possible – legal and illegal – to rig the election.
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Hans von Spakovsky told WND, "[T]he progressive left and the Obama Justice Department have waged a litigation war against voter ID laws," because, "They want their campaign allies to be able to commit fraud in order to win."
Von Spakovsky is a widely respected legal and constitutional scholar, a senior legal fellow in the Heritage Foundation's Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and manager of its Election Law Reform Initiative.
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"I don’t think the biggest problem is rigged touch-screen machines," he told WND. "Occasionally, those machines are not calibrated correctly as they need to be in order to make sure that the touch screen matches where a voter is putting his or her finger."
"That is a relatively minor problem that can be corrected by election officials as soon as a voter notifies them that there is a problem," he continued. "I don’t think this is a malicious problem caused by someone rigging the machine; it is just a fact that touch screens need to be properly calibrated."
But that didn't mean von Spakovsky did not see the potential for fraud. Far from it.
"My biggest concern is that the evidence is there that thousands of noncitizens are registered all over the country. And I have no doubt that many of them will illegally vote in the upcoming election. If enough of them vote and we have a close election, they could change the outcome."
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Indeed, WND reported just last week the findings in Gateway Pundit that "12 states and the District of Columbia allow driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants,” and, “Almost half of California’s driver’s licenses went to illegal aliens last year.”
Hans von Spakovsky
Von Spakovsky noted, "And the Justice Department has done everything it can, with the help of bad federal judges, to stop states from being able to verify citizenship. Democrats clearly want noncitizens to register and vote and get away with it undetected and undeterred because they believe it will help them win."
The validity of that was evidenced in an email revealed by WikiLeaks on Wednesday, sent by Clinton campaign manager John Podesta on Feb. 3, 2015, indicating he is not troubled by voter fraud.
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As WND reported last week, Podesta wrote, “On the picture ID, the one thing I have thought of in that space is that if you show up on Election Day with a drivers license with a picture, attest that you are a citizen, you have a right to vote in Federal elections.”
"Also," continued von Spakovsky, "the Project Veritas undercover video makes it clear that Democratic campaign consultants having been organizing fraud in prior elections and planned to implement it again in this election by sending in droves of individuals by bus and private cars to vote in various states under the names of other voters that they are know are dead, have moved away, or are bogus names."
In that video, a Democratic Party activist told undercover investigators for Project Veritas that his party has been rigging elections "for 50 years."
“You know what? We’ve been busing people in to deal with you f—ing a—–es for 50 years, and we’re not going to stop now,” said Scott Foval, the national field director for Americans United for Change.
Such revelations led von Spakovsky to conclude, "That also explains why the progressive left and the Obama Justice Department have waged a litigation war against voter ID laws. They want their campaign allies to be able to commit fraud in order to win."
Scott Foval
That dramatic claim is backed by another revelation Foval made on camera: that his team's dirty tricks were actually financed by the Clinton campaign, using a number of middlemen to cover their tracks.
"The [Clinton] campaign pays DNC, DNC pays Democracy Partners, Democracy Partners pays the Foval Group, The Foval Group goes and executes the s--t," he admitted on video.
More evidence of the potential for widespread fraud was uncovered during the Sunday airing of "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson."
She recounted how Virginia's Democrat Gov. Terry McAuliffe, elected in 2014, promptly embarked upon restoring voting rights to more than 200,000 convicted felons with the stroke of a pen. That was shot down in court, but McAuliffe has already restored voting rights of nearly 13,000 felons using individual case reviews.
Attkisson spoke with Loudoun County Commonwealth’s attorney, Republican Jim Plowman, who said the governor's order violated the state constitution.
He and more than a third of Virginia's Commonwealth attorneys joined a lawsuit to stop it. Plowman said the group was non-partisan, as only 19 of the 43 were Republicans.
He told Attkisson, "A database was just dumped into the voter system, and it wasn't vetted, it wasn't looked at, it wasn't scrubbed."
Sharyl Attkisson
So Plowman looked at names on the database and discovered voting rights granted to such ineligible felons as those still on probation, mentally incapacitated or with new charges pending. One was never even a U.S. citizen.
Attkisson also reported, "In neighboring Maryland, Democrats are also going for the ex-con vote; this year, the General Assembly expanded voting rights to 40,000 felons still on probation or parole."
And, "in California, Governor Jerry Brown just signed into law a bill to return voting rights to 50,000 convicted felons while they're still doing time behind bars in county jails, starting next year."
Also on last Sunday's Full Measure, Attkisson spoke to a cyber security expert who claimed concerns about voter fraud are exaggerated, but the threat to voting systems by computer hackers is real.
Cyber security expert Tyler Cohen Wood said if he were to break into the voting systems, it would not necessarily be the voting machines that he would go after.
"I would be going after is the central polling system, and I would also go after the third-party administrators of the people who are taking in the votes, which is what happened in Arizona and Illinois and possibly Florida," he told Attkisson.
"And I would send them a phishing email. I would send them something so I could be in that system, and I would find a way to manipulate that data. I would also add people. I would remove people. Or, I could change the results," Wood chillingly concluded.
The possibility of electronic election fraud jumped back into the news on Tuesday with people on Facebook reporting machines switching votes for Republicans to Democrats in at least two Texas towns during early voting that began Monday.
Lisa Houlette of Amarillo, Texas, described how every time she tried to vote a straight Republican ticket, the machine kept checking the Clinton/Kaine box.
In Arlington, Shandy Clark said a relative had the same experience, and was told by poll workers, "It had been happening."
A post on Reddit warned, "Multiple reports on my Facebook, Periscope, Snapchat, and Twitter from my friends in Texas, and all of them had their vote switched to Clinton automatically."
Then, as if to echo those reports, a remarkable video from the 2014 election appeared on Twitter on Tuesday morning.
The video clip (at the top of this page), which appears to be shot inside a Virginia voting booth, shows a person repeatedly trying to vote for the Republican candidate for Congress, and the machine repeatedly switching it the Democrat.
(In that election, incumbent Rep. E. Scott Rigel, R-Va., did beat Democrat challenger Suzanne D. Patrick for the 2nd district seat in the House of Representatives.)
Actually, that video has been in the news before, right after it was shot in November of 2014.
WND's Jerome Corsi reported at the time that the video was provided by Rigel's campaign, and it was recorded in Virginia Beach. Voting machine problems were reported in 43 precincts across Virginia during the 2014 election.
"Every error is going against my campaign and in favor of my challenger," Rigell said at a news conference.
Problems with touch-screen voting machines are nothing new. WND reported about two-dozen serious voting problems in the 2012 election, many involving the machines.
- A technician monitoring voting machines in Chicago saw error messages appear whenever a vote was cast for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, but no problem when votes were cast for President Obama. When he alerted a precinct worker, he was told to ignore it.
- An election observer witnessed up to 10 percent of the ballots cast at a polling station in Pennsylvania give Obama a vote no matter who the voter had selected.
- Similar cases were documented in battleground states, including polling places in Marion County, Ohio; Pueblo County, Colorado; and Guilford County, Jamestown and Pleasant Garden in North Carolina. More complaints were reported in Texas, Maryland and Nevada.
But perhaps the biggest indicator of electoral fraud in 2012 went uninvestigated.
As WND reported at the time, in 2012 Obama received a statically impossible 100 percent of the vote in some inner-city precincts. He garnered between 98 and 100 percent of the vote in precincts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland, Ohio.
Local officials called for federal investigations, but not one was launched. Politifact declared there was no fraud, arguing, essentially, there just were not any Republicans in the inner city.
The bottom line is many Americans appear to have already lost faith in the system, and they agree with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's assertion the election is "rigged."
The PRRI 2016 American Values Survey, released Tuesday by the left-leaning Brookings Institution found fewer than half of Americans trust the election system.
The survey found only 43 percent "of the public say they have a great deal of confidence that their vote will be counted accurately."
Furthermore, "Roughly four in ten (38 percent) Americans report having only some confidence, while close to one in five (17 percent) say they have hardly any confidence their vote will be accurately counted."
Democrats trust the system more than Republicans.
The survey found, "70 percent of Clinton supporters but only 41 percent of Trump supporters, reporting a great deal of confidence their votes will be counted accurately."
