US election 2020: Voter fraud allegations cast worrying doubts
While Democrats claim voter fraud never happens, startling footage of an alleged vote-harvesting operation in Ilhan Omar’s hometown casts doubt on that notion, writes Miranda Devine.
Opinion
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Worrying allegations about voter fraud have emerged in the US just five weeks before the presidential election.
President Trump has been warning that increased use of mail-in absentee ballots, due to COVID-19 concerns about in-person voting, would result in fraud, especially when unsolicited ballots are mailed to all voters in Democrat states.
Now Minneapolis police are investigating reports of a ballot harvesting racket in Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s backyard, where paid workers illegally gather absentee ballots from elderly Somali immigrants in public housing.
The scheme was revealed on Monday (Sydney time) by undercover news organisation Project Veritas in the first of a two-part investigation which appeared in my column in the New York Post and caught the eye of the President.
Rigged Election! https://t.co/ysYCBCyxf8
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 29, 2020
“This is totally illegal,” Trump tweeted. “Hope that the US Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review??? If not, why not???
“We will win Minnesota because of (Ilhan Omar) and law enforcement.”
The Cash for Ballots story landed just 48 hours before Trump was to meet Joe Biden in the hotly anticipated first presidential debate, addressing topics including election security.
The alleged involvement of Ilhan Omar, a controversial member of the so-called Squad, a group of Democratic Socialist congresswomen, is claimed on camera by two people in Project Veritas’ investigation, including whistleblower Omar Jamal, a Minneapolis community leader and chair of the city’s Somali Watchdog Group.
One alleged ballot harvester, Liban Mohamed, is shown in a bombshell Snapchat video rifling through piles of ballots strewn across his dashboard.
“I have 300 ballots in my car right now … Numbers don’t lie. You can see my car is full. All these here are absentee ballots,” he says, displaying the white envelopes.
Under Minnesota law no individual can hold more than three absentee ballots for someone else.
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The second part of Project Veritas’ investigation, released on Tuesday (Sydney time), features video of a “ballot harvester” paying a voter “pocket money” of $200 in cash to fill out a registration form for an absentee ballot.
A man identified as Osman Ali Dahquane, a Minneapolis taxi driver, was also secretly recorded by a Project Veritas investigator admitting to being paid for his ballot.
“I was given money so I could vote: $800”, he says, in Somali, subtitled in English. Project Veritas’ investigation raises serious concerns about the security of mail-in ballots, as election officials brace for millions more Americans to vote by mail, as Democrats are urging.
Biden’s campaign has reportedly hired teams of lawyers for a potentially nightmarish contest over ballot eligibility after election day
While FBI director, Christopher Wray, told the Senate last week, “we have not seen, historically, any kind of co-ordinated national voter fraud effort in a major election”, troubling examples have arisen recently.
In Pennsylvania, nine military ballots were found in a dumpster, it was revealed last week. Seven of the ballots were marked for Trump, while the other two are unknown.
In New Jersey, two officials were charged with election fraud last month after hundreds of mail-in-ballots were discarded.
While many on the Left deny there is a problem, the Heritage Foundation has documented 1285 proven instances of voter fraud in the past four years, including false voter registrations; duplicate voting; fraudulent absentee ballots; vote buying; intimidation of voters; ineligible voting by foreigners; and altering of vote counts.
Election integrity should not be a partisan issue. Yet Democrats oppose sensible voter identification laws, which for some reason they regard as “disenfranchising” people of colour.
You’d almost think they wanted to steal the election.