Tuesday, February 7, 2017

NYC Agency Rejects Claim That It Found Voter Fraud


File this one under the Law of Unintended Consequences.

During the Bloomberg Administration, the New York City's Department of Investigation (DOI) sent undercover investigators to see if they could impersonate ineligible Voters who remained on the Rolls without being stopped by Poll Workers. In 62 of 63 tries, they succeeded.

Fast forward four years to President Trump's assertion, conjured out of thin air, that millions of people Voted Illegally for Clinton, whom former Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed because he considered Trump unqualified.

Republican National Lawyers Association Vice Chairman Larry Levy claimed in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal last week that the DOI report about Voter Fraud in the City found "the problem is real" and that the probe supports allegations of Illegal Voting by millions of Undocumented Immigrants.

It did nothing of the sort, said Mark Peters, a Democrat who runs the DOI, but was not there when the report was done. "It is a concern when a report we prepared, based on sound investigative steps, is used to support claims that are unsupported by any facts," Peters said in a statement. "Here, we did not substantiate a single instance of illegal voting. Rather, we found various systemic vulnerabilities including the failure to purge voters from the rolls who had died. However, our report expressly stated that the evidence collected by the investigation was 'not a finding of actual voter fraud.'"

Nor did the Investigation have anything to do with Undocumented Immigrants, who tend to stay under the radar rather than Register at Government Agencies like the Board of Elections (BOE).

The response by Peters, however, is not likely to get anywhere near the attention that Levy's Op-Ed did.

In a commentary headlined, “Voter Fraud a Myth? That’s not what New York Investigators Found,” Attorney Larry Levy reveals that back in 2013, the New York City DOI conducted a test on the Voting system. Investigators posed as 63 individuals still on the City Voter Rolls despite having died, moved out of the Jurisdiction, or been Convicted of a Felony at least two years earlier.

“The investigators didn’t go to great lengths to hide their fraudulent votes,” Mr. Levy writes. “In five instances investigators in their 20s and 30s posed as voters age 82 to 94. In some cases, the investigators were of different ethnic backgrounds from the voters they were impersonating.”

Others informed Poll Workers that they had moved, but didn’t have time to get to their new homes on Election Day. “Only one investigator was flat-out rejected,” Mr. Levy writes.

In that case, the imposter was posing as a felon whose mother, coincidentally, was a Poll Worker at the site where the investigator tried to vote.

However, actual cases of people Impersonating real or Ineligible Voters, and casting Votes that count, are somewhere between exceedingly rare and nonexistent. Yet the City's Investigation is being held up as proof that that happens.

"Unsubstantiated and irresponsible claims of voter fraud, not only distract from this work, they hinder law enforcement activities needed to keep all of us safe," Peters said in his statement. "Such baseless allegations can sow fear and distrust among many New Yorkers, making them less likely to work with law enforcement."

After reading many articles about this issue, it is obvious that most of the problems center around the local BOE's not doing their job of Maintaining the Voter Rolls and the Training of Poll Site workers in the proper Site Operations.











NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
Digg! StumbleUpon

No comments: