Massive Non-Citizen Voting Uncovered in Maryland
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jd50ae:Massive Non-Citizen Voting Uncovered in Maryland
By Bryan Preston, PJ Media
An election integrity watchdog group is suing the state of Maryland, alleging that it has discovered massive and ongoing fraudulent voting by non-U.S. citizens in one county. But because of the way that the non-citizens are able to cast votes in elections, the fraud is likely happening in every single county and subdivision across the state. The group believes that the illegal voting has been happening for years.
The group, Virginia Voters Alliance, says that it compared how voters in Frederick County filled out jury duty statements compared with their voting records. The groups investigation found that thousands of people in Frederick County who stated that they are not U.S. citizens on jury duty forms went on to cast votes in elections. Either they failed to tell the truth when they were summoned for jury duty, or they cast illegal votes. Both are crimes. The same group previously found that about 40,000 people are registered to vote in both Virginia and Maryland.
It is a federal crime to cast votes if you are not legally eligible to vote. Non-citizens, whether in the country legally or not, are prohibited from voting in most local and all state and federal elections. Yet the VVA investigation found that hundreds of non-citizens have been voting in Frederick County, Maryland. One in seven Maryland residents are non-U.S. citizens.
The lawsuit is the equivalent of the lookout spotting the iceberg ahead of the Titanic, state Del. Pat McDonough told the Tatler. He added that the groups investigation found a voter fraud smoking gun.
Maryland state law makes it easier for non-citizens, both those present legally and those in the country against the law, to vote. Maryland issues drivers licenses to legal and illegal aliens. Drivers licenses in turn make it easier under the Motor Voter law to register to vote. Maryland also offers copious taxpayer-funded social programs to non-citizens in the state.
The group filed suit in Baltimores U.S. District Court on Friday. They are suing the Frederick County Board of Elections and the Maryland State Board of Elections.
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Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America.
At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states Georgia, Virginia and Washington have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud. The three states lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too 1 in 11 are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next weeks electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.Its Jim Crow all over again, says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who cofounded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Martin Luther King, Jr. Lowery, now 93, says he recognizes in the list of threatened voters a sophisticated new form of an old and tired tactic. I think [the Republicans] would use anything they can find. Their desperation is rising.
Based on the Crosscheck lists, officials have begun the process of removing names from the rolls beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone. Yet the criteria used for matching these double voters are disturbingly inadequate.Is your state in the Crosscheck program?See a table of participating states and the election officials responsible for running Crosscheck.
There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.
That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates dont seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.
In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical matches identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include: Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes.John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia. Robert Dewey **** of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen **** of Springfield, Virginia.
Al Jazeera America visited these and several other potential double voters. John Paul Williams of Alexandria insists he has never used the alias John R. Williams. Ive never lived in Georgia, he says.Jo ****, wife of suspected double voter Robert Glen **** of Virginia, says she has a solid alibi for him. **** is 85 years old and handicapped. He wasnt in Georgia. Never voted there, she says. He has also never used the middle name Dewey. Twenty-three percent of the names nearly 1.6 million of them lack matching middle names. Jr. and Sr. are ignored, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family. And, notably, of those who may have voted twice in the 2012 presidential election, 27 percent were listed as inactive voters, meaning that almost 1.9 million may not even have voted once in that race, according to Crosschecks own records. Al Jazeera America met with Kevin Antonio Hayes at his home in Durham. He is listed as having voted a second time, in Virginia, with the middle name Thomas, Hayes and his mother insist that he did not vote at all.
Mark Swedlund is a specialist in list analytics whose clients have included eBay, AT&T and Nike. At Al Jazeera Americas request, he conducted a statistical review of Crosschecks three lists of suspected double voters. According to Swedlund, It appears that Crosscheck does have inherent bias to over-selecting for potential scrutiny and purging voters from Asian, Hispanic and Black ethnic groups. In fact, the matching methodology, which presumes people in other states with the same name are matches, will always over-select from groups of people with common surnames. Swedlund sums up the method for finding two-state voters simply matching first and last name as ludicrous, just crazy.
Fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in the participating 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voting twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too 1 in 11 are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.
I think the Asian community would be shocked to see that we are the most criminally suspect of the bunch, says Helen Ho, commenting on the number of Chungs, Parks and Kims on the suspected double-voter lists. Ho is a civil-rights attorney who heads Asian Americans Advancing Justice-Atlanta, based in Doraville, a legal-advocacy center in the heart of the Asian immigrant community in Georgia. Most of us are naturalized citizens, she says. Most of us have to take the citizenship exam. So we know the Constitution and the rules much better than most Americans. So the question is, Why would a disproportionate number of Asian-Americans risk breaking the law to vote twice?
With millions of suspects, one question keeps arising: Why have there been no mass convictions? Kobach proudly proclaims that Kansas has referred 14 voters for prosecution for double voting. And none of them has been convicted.Yet demands to purge lists of double voters have reached a histrionic volume. In April of this year, former presidential counselor *** Morris told Fox TV audiences that probably over a million people that voted twice in [the 2012] election. This is the first concrete evidence weve ever had of massive voter fraud.In North Carolina, state officials have hired former FBI agent Charles W. Chuck Stuber, who played a major role in the campaign finance fraud case brought against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, to, in the words of their press release, investigate cases of possible voter fraud identified by an interstate cross-check comparing election records from 28 states.
But despite knowing the names and addresses of 192,207 supposed double voters in the state, Stuber has not nabbed a single one in his five months on the job. Josh Lawson, a spokesman for the board of elections, says, This agency has made no determination as to which portion of these [lists] represent data error or voter fraud. In fact, to date, Lawson admits that Stuber has found only errors and not one verified fraudulent voter. But Lawson did shine a light on the great benefit of the Crosscheck manhunt to the states Republican Party, now locked in a tight battle over the U.S. Senate seat of incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan. While the use of Crosscheck has yet to produce a single indictment of a double voter, Lawson says, the program could be used for list maintenance. That is, voters on the list, proven guilty or not, could be subject to a process of removal from the voter rolls.
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