'Exploiting immigrant voters, it should be noted, is nothing new'
In a lengthy 2012 article in the New York Times, Adam Liptak affirmed the liberal case against mail-in ballots. “On the most basic level,” wrote Liptak, “absentee voting replaces the oversight that exists at polling places with something akin to an honor system.”
Moving beyond mere principle, Liptak cited numerous cases in which mail-in ballots denied citizens their due. “Votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted,” he argued, “more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth, statistics show.”
In addition to innocent errors, fraud was “vastly more prevalent” in mail-in voting than voting in person. “Election administrators have a shorthand name for a central weakness of voting by mail,” wrote Liptak. “They call it granny farming.”
He cited many of the problems the Jimmy Carter-James Baker commission did in 2005, the intimidation of the elderly and the easy purchasing of votes among them.
Liptak gave the article’s final word to a Yale law professor who reaffirmed that “all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots and the like.”
In 2020, with COVID as an excuse, Minnesota ignored the warnings of Jimmy Carter and the New York Times and bet the farm on granny farming.
“There is a change to Minnesota state election law that help these elections be safer, read one official document. “The main part of the bill focuses on absentee voting. The bill provides money to promote using absentee so people can vote from home.” Gov. Tim Walz signed the bill into law, and Democratic operatives immediately went to work, especially in Minneapolis’s large Somali community.
In September 2020, James O’Keefe went public with Project Veritas’s research into the states’ industrial-strength “granny farming.” Aiding the Project Veritas team were a few undercover journalists from within that community alarmed by the Democrats’ exploitation of their countrymen.
Exploiting immigrant voters, it should be noted, is nothing new. Democrats have held a near monopoly on urban vote fraud since at least the mid-nineteenth century when Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall mastered the art of picking winners.
As Democratic and media interests began to meld, however, journalists stopped seeing fraud, let alone exposing it. As the November election approached, the media would ignore Jimmy Carter’s cautions and treat each Democratic vote as though Jesus Christ Himself had notarized it.
In 2020 in Minneapolis, Project Veritas was serving much the same role as the Times did in the Boss Tweed era. Thanks to undercover video, Veritas captured several financial exchanges between harvesters and voters, but Veritas’s biggest catch was a video shot by a harvester himself.
The harvester was Liban Osman, an ally of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and the brother of Jamal Osman then running for city council in an early special election.
One video, posted on Snapchat, showed Osman sorting through a stack of ballots the way he might a roll of bills. “Two in the morning,” he sang as he sorted. “Still hustling.”
On camera, Osman boasted about a practice that would have made Boss Tweed blush. “Numbers don’t lie. Numbers don’t lie,” said Osman. “You can see my car is full. All these here are absentees’ ballots. Can’t you see? Look at all these. My car is full.”
Osman did not expect the video to fall into enemy hands, but it did. A Project Veritas source was following Osman’s Snapchat account and captured his video.
Through a variety of friendly channels, millions of Americans saw the Project Veritas videos. The chicanery they showed was too obvious and too consequential to ignore or defend.
So the Democrats enlisted their go-to fixers at the New York Times. In a September 29 article headlined, “Project Veritas Video was a ‘Coordinated Disinformation Campaign,’ Researchers Say,” reporter Maggie Astor led the attack.
According to Astor, researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington concluded that the Veritas videos were “probably” part of a disinformation campaign.
Once Astor enlisted academia to validate a transparent falsehood, the lesser media, including the local media in Minneapolis, felt free to pile on.
Reinforcing the deception was the left’s “fact-checking” apparatus. A typical headline, this one from USA Today, read, “Fact Check: No Proof of Alleged Voter Fraud Scheme or Connection to Rep. Ilhan Omar.”
Thanks to social media, millions of Americans witnessed not only a flagrant vote fraud scheme, but also a coordinated media campaign to bury the fraud.
That campaign involved the Democratic Party, the major media, academia, the local media, and their “fact-checking” allies. Months later, the pre-Musk Twitter got in on the game, permanently banning Project Veritas.
This coordinated mischief paid off. The Democrats got 350,000 more votes for their barely functional 2020 candidate than they did for their popular 2016 candidate, an astonishing 26 percent improvement.
The votes did not come at President Trump’s expense. After a successful first term, Trump increased his Minnesota numbers by 12 percent.
Rather than fix what was broken, Walz and his newly elected Democratic legislature doubled down in 2023, passing a so-called “Democracy for the People Act.”
This act established automatic voter registration at state agencies, a permanent list for mail-in ballots, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, strengthened penalties against voter intimidation, but nary a word about voter fraud. Soon after, Walz signed another bill into law that would allow more than 50,000 Minnesotans on parole, probation, or community release due to felony convictions to vote.
Say what you will, but Wall and the Democrats understand their base.
Jack Cashill’s new book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is now available in all formats.
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