Elections

A Delaware County man who admitted to authorities that he forged signatures of deceased people on absentee ballots is now facing voter fraud charges, according to authorities.

Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters. Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.

Susan couldn't believe what she was hearing. Client after client, developmentally disabled person after developmentally disabled person all told the same story: Their vote was stolen from them. Susan, a disability service coordinator who works with developmentally disabled adults who live in various assisted living facilities and group homes in and around Milwaukee, says every one of her more than 20 clients told her that they were either pressured to vote for Democratic candidate Joe Biden or had a vote cast for Biden before they ever had a chance to see their ballot.

Cabrera, who was paid by more than a half-dozen candidates for judicial office, had several absentee ballots in her possession at the time of her arrest and kept a notebook with over 500 names and addresses of voters who she targeted. These mostly elderly Hispanics in Hialeah were labeled as “Deisy’s Voters” and included information about whether the voter was illiterate, blind, deaf, or had Alzheimer’s.

In the days before nursing homes and long-term care facilities were in a state of perpetual lockdown, Election Day was an event. Older Pennsylvanians, among the state’s most dedicated voters, strolled into the lobby of the facility where they lived or hopped on a shuttle to a polling place. Others voted absentee and slipped their ballots into the mail, little worry about backlogs or delays. Today, Pennsylvania’s nursing homes, where the coronavirus took thousands of lives and turned the world upside down, are no longer polling places. Many facilities require those who leave the building to quarantine upon return, and some still don’t allow visitors, such as loved ones who could help a resident fill out a ballot or put it in the right envelope.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Wednesday a woman accused of voter fraud and depicted in online videos in San Antonio has been arrested. Paxton said Raquel Rodriguez is charged with election fraud, illegal voting, unlawfully assisting people voting by mail and unlawfully possessing an official ballot. If Rodriguez is convicted, she could face up to 20 years in prison, Paxton said.

Investigators said Mohamed opened a post office box under the name of a nursing home, then “forged at least 84 voter registration applications” and sent those ballots to that post office box. The sheriff’s office put the post office under surveillance and waited on the person who had access to that box to retrieve the ballots.

Now O’Keefe has trained his cameras on “ballot harvesting,” in which third parties collect mail-in ballots and deliver them to election officials. While illegal in some states, it is legal in California and other states. The individual collecting the ballots can even be a paid campaign worker for someone who is on the ballot. So-called ballot brokers will target certain communities, apartment complexes, or nursing homes to collect votes for their political party.

A Hialeah boletera at the center of a weeklong absentee-ballot investigation that muddied the Miami-Dade mayor’s race was arrested Thursday after police say she fraudulently obtained an absentee ballot from a terminally ill woman in a nursing home. Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article1941717.html#storylink=cpy

In a rare move, a Superior Court judge this week threw out the November election results for a City Council seat, ordering a new election after finding that the city's Democratic chairwoman took advantage of elderly nursing home residents.