More (Republican) Voter Fraud Uncovered

Lock them up!  Lock them up! An election fraud crime spree is uncovered at Florida's "friendliest active adult retirement community"!

Three residents of The Villages have recently been arrested as part of an ongoing investigation into voter fraud, court records show.

Jay Ketcik, Joan Halstead and John Rider are each charged with casting more than one ballot in an election, a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.  [snip]

Ketcik, 63, is accused of voting by mail in Florida in October 2020 while also casting an absentee ballot in his original home state of Michigan, court records show.

Halstead, 71, voted in-person in Florida but also cast an absentee ballot in New York, prosecutors allege.

Ketcik and Halstead turned themselves in to the Sumter County jail on outstanding warrants, court records show.

Rider, 61, was arrested by Brevard County deputies at the Royal Caribbean cruise ship terminal at Port Canaveral on Dec. 3, according to court records. Details of the accusations against him were not immediately available, but prosecutors indicated he also cast ballots both out-of-state and in Florida. [snip]

All three are registered as Republicans in Florida, voter registration records show.

Facebook pages that appear to belong to Ketcik and Halstead contain several posts expressing support for former president Donald Trump.

It wasn't reported whether any of the (allegedly!) felonious fascists attempted to make an escape via golf cart.

BONUS: Unrelated, but amusing: The Villages community was once the subject of an urban legend that STDs flourished there. Heh heh.

(Photo:  golf cart festooned with racist pro-Trump signs at June 2020 "parade" at The Villages)

Voter Fraud, Republican Granny Style

 

A Florida woman was arrested Monday for voter fraud in a local school board election. Seventy-two year old registered Republican Joan Halstead was running for the Sumpter County, FL, school board, but withdrew before the election. Law enforcement charged her with fraud for casting more than one ballot in the election, booked her and released her on $2,000 bond. As the linked article put it, "Her social media activity suggests she is a supporter of former President Donald Trump." You can bet if she cared that much about a school board election, she was likely up to the same trick in November 2020.

Local governments, from school boards to county election officials, are the targets of right-wing political agitation, with racist dog-whistle "critical race theory" claims and book banning the weapons used to inflame their low-information base voters into harassing local officials. Trumpists like Ms. Halstead aren't shy about committing election fraud on her small scale to advance their agenda, any more than Republican state legislatures are about tilting the playing field through gerrymandering and voter suppression on a statewide scale.

(photo: The Trumpist granny gangster. Villages-News.com)

Republican Crime Blotter: Mixing Voter Fraud And Murder

 

Attention Republican voter fraud  crimebusters:

A Colorado man suspected in the death of his wife who disappeared on Mother’s Day 2020 is also accused of submitting a fraudulent vote on her behalf for Donald Trump in November’s presidential election, newly released court documents show.

Barry Morphew told investigators he mailed the ballot on behalf of his wife, Suzanne Morphew, to help Trump win, saying “all these other guys are cheating,” and that he thought his wife would have voted for Trump anyway, according to an arrest warrant affidavit signed Thursday by a judge in Chaffee County.

Morphew, 53, faces possible first-degree murder and other charges in connection with the disappearance of Suzanne Morphew on May 10, 2020. He was arrested May 5 and is currently being held in connection with that case.

Clearly, this requires more stringent voter suppression integrity laws to make sure that only Republicans with Mr. Morphew's integrity get to cast a ballot.

(Photo: Morphew's mugshot/ Chaffee County (CO) Sheriff's Office)

More Voter Fraud, Republican-Style

Let's see who's voter fraud-ing this time:

A freshman Kansas congressman who had listed a UPS Inc. postal box as his residence on a state voter registration form was charged Tuesday with three felonies, including illegal voting.

The charges against GOP Rep. Steve Watkins came three weeks before the state's Aug. 4 primary election with fellow Republicans pushing to oust him from the eastern Kansas seat he barely won in 2018, even though he's largely toed the conservative policy line and supported President Donald Trump. GOP critics already had worried that the months-long investigation into whether Watkins violated state election laws puts the 2nd District seat in play if he wins the primary.

Watkins called the charges “hyper-political” even though the district attorney who filed them also is a Republican. The congressman said during a televised debate Tuesday evening that he hadn't seen the charges but has done nothing wrong. [snip]

The most serious criminal charge accuses Watkins of voting in the 2019 local city and school board election without being qualified. A first-time offender who's convicted could face a year in prison, though the more typical sentence would be two years' probation.

[District Attorney Mike] Kagay also charged Watkins with voting illegally in advance and interfering with law enforcement by providing false information. Both felonies could bring up to seven months in prison, though a year's probation is the presumed sentence.

Watkins also was charged with failing to notify the state Division of Vehicles of a change of address, a misdemeanor.

 Watkins is the "honorary" state co- chair of the Trump re- election campaign (but of course he is).

Republican Voter Fraud In North Carolina, Georgia

The Republican Party, which uses "voter fraud" to justify voter- suppressing voter i.d. laws and purges of voter rolls, has been caught once again committing (allegedly!) voter fraud on a massive scale (our emphasis throughout):

DUBLIN, N.C. — In a low-slung, aging commercial strip across the street from an online-gaming parlor here, a local operative named Leslie McCrae Dowless ran his command center for Republican Mark Harris in the 9th Congressional District primary this spring.  

Dowless sat at a desk at the back of one of the strip’s vacant storefronts, where he oversaw a crew of workers who collected absentee ballots from voters and updated the Harris campaign on the numbers, according to Jeff Smith, who is the building’s owner and a former Dowless friend. [snip]

And, by "collected absentee ballots" they mean "collected and shitcanned Democratic absentee ballots":

Investigators with the bipartisan state elections board — which last week voted unanimously to delay certifying the race — have identified hundreds of potential witnesses to interview, many of them voters whose absentee ballots were never turned in, according to the people familiar with the probe. That raises the possibility of a weeks-long investigation and an uncertain start date for the next congressman from the 9th District. 

That Republican operative at the center of this, Dowless, he's seems nice:

Dowless, 62, who serves as vice chairman of the Bladen Soil and Water Conservation District, has a criminal record. Court records show he was convicted of fraud, perjury and passing a worthless check in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 

He first came under scrutiny from the state elections board in 2016, when officials began investigating similar ballot irregularities, leading to a public hearing. 

That year, in the 9th District primary election, Dowless was on the campaign payroll of Todd Johnson, a Union County insurance salesman who also won a curious number of the mail-in ballots in Bladen County: 211, compared with four for Harris, who was also a candidate that year, and just one for the incumbent, Rep. Robert Pittenger (R), records show. Johnson did not respond to a request for comment. 

There's fishy, and then there's... Fishy (click to enlarge):



There's more data and anecdotal evidence of voter fraud in this North Carolina Congressional District at the link above.  The Democrats are going to court over it., while State election officials are working with the FBI and U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, and the State Bureau of Investigation is also on the case. ("Lock them up, lock them up!")

In Georgia, there's a special runoff election today (!!) with conservaDem John Barrow hoping to reverse some of the egregious voter suppression tactics of "Governor- elect" Brian Kemp. Turnout by Democrats and anyone interested in free and fair elections will be critical. A lawsuit filed by a voting rights group  supporting Democrat Stacey Abrams alleges gross mismanagement of the recent runoff election.  If Barrow is elected today, the lawsuit would provide fertile ground for making changes in Georgia's discriminatory election systems.