Democrats charged with mail-in voter fraud

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks March 30, 2020, in the Rose Garden at the White House. (Official White House photo by Tia Dufour)

Democrats continue to dismiss President Trump's claim that mass mail-in voting invites fraud, but charges against two Democratic councilmen in New Jersey reinforce the concerns of Republicans.

Paterson, New Jersey, councilman Michael Jackson and councilman-elect Alex Mendez were charged along with two other men with election fraud, mail-in voting fraud and illegal possession of mail-in ballots, Breitbart News reported.

In Paterson's recent all-mail-in election, according to New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal, some 20% of the mail-in votes cast were thrown out by the Board of Elections.

Democrats insist on implementing mail-invoting nationwide due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, recent data does not support the health concerns. In Wisconsin's April election, for example, only 52 of more than 400,000 voters and poll workers were confirmed to have contracted the coronavirus, an infection rate below two-hundredths of 1%.

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In the New Jersey case, prosecutors also charged two men linked to a councilman's campaign, Shelim Khalique and Abu Razyen. Shelim Khalique is the brother of Paterson councilman Shahin Khalique, who led a campaign to allow the Islamic call to prayer in the city, Breitbart reported. Abu Razyen is linked to Khalique's re-election campaign, according to Grewal.

Jackson allegedly collected mail-in ballots from voters in recent city council elections and delivered them to the Passaic County Board of Elections. Prosecutors say he did not identify himself when he dropped off the ballots. In one instance, he took an unsealed ballot that had not been filled out and delivered it sealed to the Board of Elections.

Jackson, 48, has been charged with third-degree fraud in casting a mail-in vote, third-degree unauthorized possession of ballots, third-degree tampering with public records, and fourth-degree falsifying or tampering with records.

Mendez, 45, also is accused of collecting ballots from voters and delivering them to election officials without identifying himself. The men each face three to five years in prison for third-degree crimes, up to 18 months in prison for fourth-degree crimes, and five to 10 years in prison for second-degree crimes.

Ballot harvesting

Mail-in balloting fraud likely impacted elections in Orange County, California, last fall.

California's Democratic-controlled state legislature allows so-called “ballot harvesting." The practice allows political activists to pick up completed ballots and turn them in by the hundreds and thousands.

In Orange County, 62% of ballots were absentee, and a substantial percentage arrived after election day. A quarter-million of them were cast by "inactive voters," meaning people who hadn't voted in the past four years.

A significant number were found to be fraudulent. The Institute for Fair Elections discovered at least 20 voters whose registered address was a local dog park. Seventy-one were registered to a Starbucks.

When it was all over, Republicans had lost every congressional seat in Orange Country, a longtime GOP stronghold.

Now, governors from New England to the South are signaling a new willingness to expand voting measures such as early voting and mail-in ballots, The Hill reported.

At a White House Coronavirus Task Force briefing in April, Trump called universal mail-in voting "a terrible thing" because of its vulnerability to vote fraud.

The president said "there's a lot of dishonesty going on with mail-in voting, mail-in ballots."

The next day, CNN's Acosta asked for evidence of vote fraud in mail-in balloting, which is conducted in several states.

Trump pointed to a Judicial Watch settlement with Los Angeles County requiring the county to remove as many as 1.6 million inactive registrations.

"Thousands of votes are gathered and dumped in a location and all of a sudden you lose elections that you think you win," Trump said.

"I'm not going to stand for it."

Trump said the country should have voter ID.

"If you send [in a ballot], you should be sure that that vote is meaningful," he said.

Judicial Watch also has filed a lawsuit in North Carolina, where many of the state's 100 counties have a large number of ineligible voters on their rolls.

In the complaint, Judicial Watch argues the states' own data shows a total of 1 million inactive voters on its rolls.

Judicial Watch noted that in June 2019, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission released data showing that voter registration rates in a significant proportion of North Carolina’s 100 counties are near, at or above 100% of their age-eligible citizenry.

Courts consider that to be a strong indication that a jurisdiction is not taking the steps required by law to remove ineligible registrants.

Judicial Watch said its analysis also showed that at the time of the EAC report, the entire state had a registration rate close to 100% of its age-eligible citizenry.

A large proportion of registrations have shown no voting activity for more than five years.

"Dirty voting rolls can mean dirty elections, and Judicial Watch must insist that North Carolina follows federal law to clean up its voting rolls," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

"We want cleaner elections, as the law requires, and we expect this lawsuit will cause North Carolina to take the simple steps necessary to clean from its rolls the names of voters who have moved away or died," he said.

Last December, Judicial Watch provided notice to 19 large counties in five states that it intended to sue unless they take steps to comply with the NVRA.

Letters have been sent to counties in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado.

In 2018, the Supreme Court upheld a voter-roll cleanup program that resulted from a Judicial Watch settlement of a federal lawsuit with Ohio.

California settled an NVRA lawsuit with Judicial Watch and last year began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls.

Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

Judicial Watch said that despite the effort, voter registration lists across the country remain significantly out of date.

Judicial Watch’s 2019 study found 378 counties nationwide that had more voter registrations than citizens old enough to vote

The 378 counties combined had about 2.5 million registrations over the 100% registered mark.

That's a drop of about 1 million from Judicial Watch's previous analysis of voter registration data in 2017.