written by Jack Phillips
Friday October 9, 2020
Officials in Ohio said that about 50,000 voters in Franklin County received incorrect absentee ballots in the mail.
“We can now confirm that 49,669 voters received an incorrect ballot. Those voters will be contacted directly by the Franklin County Board of Elections and a replacement ballot will be mailed to them,” said the Franklin County Board of Elections.
In a news release on Friday, the board said it’s started the process of printing out new absentee ballots to replace the erroneous ones, and it will mail the replacements to every voter who got the wrong ballot. Those ballots will be sent via the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) in the next 72 hours, officials said.
“We want to make it clear that every voter who received an inaccurate ballot will receive a corrected ballot,” the board said. “Stringent tracking measures are in place to guarantee that a voter can only cast one vote.”
It came after New York City recently was forced to mail 100,000 absentee ballots after a printing error was reported.
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office has directed the board to write a letter that explains the error along with the replacements.
“No vote will be counted twice. Every voter will receive an accurate ballot and that ballot will be counted,” county Elections Director Ed Leonard said.
Leonard said that if a voter sends both the replacement ballot and the original, erroneous ballot then the replacement will be the one that is counted. If a voter sends only the original ballot, only their votes on races that they were eligible to vote in will be counted.
“While this process has taken longer than we’d like, we aren’t just determining a number. We’re determining and identifying each impacted voter,” Leonard said in a news conference on Thursday.
Leonard blamed a malfunction with one of the scanners used to process the ballots.
“On October 3 at 2:24 p.m., a function of one of those scanners was disabled,” he said in a news conference. “This was determined to be the root cause of the system error that led to voters receiving an incorrect ballot.”
Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, issued a directive to Franklin County on Thursday to fix the mistake.
LaRose said the county’s board of elections has to create a process for voters who got the wrong ballot and clearly explain that the new one will be sent. The board has to also hold onto it until a correct replacement is submitted, he added, saying that if a correct ballot is never received, the original must be “processed, remade, and scanned on or after the 11th day after the election.”
Over the past several months, President Donald Trump has frequently highlighted errors in the vote-by-mail system, urging people to go to the polls to vote, while adding that it could lead to election chaos or even rigging.
In recent days, about 2,100 Los Angeles County voters received mail-in ballots without a way to vote for president as the ballots omitted the presidential race, and a USPS mail carrier in New Jersey was arrested on Oct. 7 for discarding mail, including almost 100 election ballots.
written by Stephen Dinan
Thursday October 8, 2020
Texas authorities announced Thursday they have arrested and charged a mayoral candidate in the Dallas area with election fraud, accusing him of running a scam to request absentee ballots in other voters’ names.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the mayoral candidate forged at least 84 applications for mail-in ballots, and when he was arrested he was in the process of stuffing envelopes to request even more.
Authorities caught onto the scheme when dozens of ballot requests were all tied back to the same post office box, which was supposedly tied to a nursing home.
But when the Denton County Sheriff’s Office investigated, it found the box had been rented using a fake driver’s license and university student ID, and people whose ballots were being sent to the box said they never made the requests.
The sheriff’s department stuck an undercover officer at the post office to watch the box, and said they struck pay dirt Wednesday when someone came to collect the ballots. They followed the person, then obtained a warrant and found the ballots and the fake IDs.
They arrested Zul Mirza Mohamed, a candidate for mayor in Carrollton, Texas, a city of about 140,000 people, north of Dallas.
He now faces 109 counts of fraud, including 25 counts of unlawful possession of a ballot and 84 counts of fraudulent use of a mail ballot application.
“Mail ballots are inherently insecure and vulnerable to fraud,” Mr. Paxton said.
His office assisted the Denton County Sheriff’s Office.
Mr. Mohamed is challenging Kevin Falconer, the incumbent mayor.
The election was supposed to have taken place in the spring but was postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The arrest is the second in two weeks involving mail ballot fraud in Texas.
Authorities late last month announced charges against a county commissioner accused of running a scam to harvest absentee ballots in the Democratic primary in 2018.
The absentee ballots appear to have accounted for Gregg County Commissioner Shannon Brown’s win over Kasha Williams, 1,047 votes to 1,042 votes. Mr. Brown won 73.4% of absentee ballots cast, the Longview News-Journal reported.
The two incidents come amid a national debate over voter fraud.
President Trump has said expanding vote-by-mail options, in which ballots are sent to voters, opens the door to fraud. Democrats say there’s no evidence of widespread fraud.
Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, who led the investigation that produced Thursday’s charges, disagreed.
“Voter fraud is a serious and widespread issue and cannot be tolerated,” he said.
He called the case “appalling.”
written by AP staff
Friday October 9, 2020
NEWARK, N.J. — A postal employee in New Jersey dumped more than 1,800 pieces of mail, federal prosecutors said Wednesday.
Nicholas Beauchene, 26, of Kearny, faced arraignment later in the day on charges of delay, secretion or detention of mail and obstruction of mail. It was not known if he had retained a lawyer.
The mail included 99 ballots for the upcoming election and more than 600 pieces of first-class mail.
The approximately 1,875 pieces of discarded mail was recovered from trash dumpsters in North Arlington and West Orange on Oct. 2, and Oct. 5., prosecutors said. It had been scheduled to be delivered to addresses on certain postal routes in Orange and West Orange.
In addition to the election ballots for residents in West Orange, prosecutors said 276 campaign flyers from candidates for the West Orange Council and for the school board also were recovered.
Prosecutors said Beauchene was the only mail carrier assigned to deliver to the addresses on the delivery dates.
The recovered mail was placed back into the mail stream for delivery.
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