Nursing Homes
Hitting up assisted-living facilities and “helping” the elderly fill out their absentee ballots was a gold mine of votes, the insider said.
“There are nursing homes where the nurse is actually a paid operative. And they go room by room by room to these old people who still want to feel like they’re relevant,” said the whistleblower. “They literally fill it out for them.”
The insider pointed to former Jersey City Mayor Gerald McCann,
who was sued in 2007 after a razor-thin victory for a local school board seat for allegedly tricking “incompetent … and ill” residents of nursing homes into casting ballots for him. McCann denied it, though did admit to assisting some nursing home residents with absentee ballot applications.
When all else failed, the insider would send operatives to vote live in polling stations, particularly in states like New Jersey and New York which do not require voter ID. Pennsylvania, also
for the most part, does not.
The best targets were registered voters who routinely skip presidential or municipal elections — information which is publicly available.
“You fill out these index cards with that person’s name and district and you go around the city and say, ‘You’re going to be him, you’re going to be him,” the insider said of how he dispatched his teams of dirty-tricksters.
At the polling place, the fake voter would sign in, “get on line and … vote,” the insider said. The imposters would simply recreate the signature that already appears in the voter roll as best they could. In the rare instance that a real voter had already signed in and cast a ballot, the impersonator would just chalk it up to an innocent mistake and bolt.
Bribing voters
The tipster said New Jersey homeless shelters offered a nearly inexhaustible pool of reliable — buyable — voters.
“They get to register where they live in and they go to the polls and vote,” he said, laughing at the roughly
$174 per vote Mike Bloomberg spent to win his third mayoral term. He said he could have delivered the same result at a 70-percent discount — like when Frank “Pupie” Raia, a real estate developer and Hoboken nabob, was
convicted last year on federal charges for paying low-income residents 50 bucks a pop to vote how he wanted during a 2013 municipal election.
Organizationally, the tipster said his voter-fraud schemes in the Garden State and elsewhere resembled Mafia organizations, with a boss (usually the campaign manager) handing off the day-to-day managing of the mob soldiers to the underboss (him). The actual candidate was usually kept in the dark deliberately so they could maintain “plausible deniability.”
With mail-in ballots, partisans from both parties hash out and count ballots at the local board of elections — debating which ballots make the cut and which need to be thrown out because of irregularities.
The insider said any ballots offered up by him or his operation would come with a bent corner along the voter certificate — which contains the voter signature — so Democratic Board of Election counters would know the fix was in and not to object.
“It doesn’t stay bent, but you can tell it’s been bent,” the tipster said. “Until the certificate is approved, the ballot doesn’t matter. They don’t get to see the ballot unless they approve the certificate.”
“I invented bending corners,” the insider boasted, saying once the fixed ballots were mixed in with the normal ones, the bed was made. “Once a ballot is opened, it’s an anonymous ballot.”
While federal law warns of prison sentences of
up to five years, busted voter frauds have seen far less punishment. While in
2018 a Texas woman was sentenced to five years, an Arizona man busted for voting twice in the mail was given just
three years probation. A study by the conservative Heritage Foundation found
more than 1,000 instances of documented voter fraud in the United States, almost all of which occurred over the last 20 years.
“There is nothing new about these techniques,” said Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at Heritage who manages their election law reform initiative. “Everything he’s talking about is perfectly possible.“