Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced 134 felony voter fraud charges against four individuals in connection to the state’s 2018 Democrat Primary – which are charges for a crime Democrats pretend doesn’t exist.
Concerns over voter fraud have become elevated this election cycle because of the proportion of votes that are expected to be cast by mail, and this case out of Texas included mail-in ballot fraud.
The primary elections were in Gregg County, and the four arrested included County Commissioner Shannon Brown, Marlena Jackson, Charlie Burns, and DeWayne Ward. The specific allegations include election fraud, tampering with government records, and mail-in ballot fraud, among other charges.
“To increase the pool of ballots needed to swing the race in Brown’s favor, the group targeted young, able-bodied voters to cast ballots by mail by fraudulently claiming the voters were ‘disabled,’ in most cases without the voters’ knowledge or consent,” Paxton’s office alleged.
Of the total charges, 97 felony counts were leveled against Jackson, 30 of them for alleged election fraud.
Many of the charges accuse her of fraudulently marking applications for other people, claiming they were eligible for mail-in ballots due to disabilities when they were not disabled.
Commissioner Brown faces 23 counts, and Burns and Ward face eight and six respectively. Penalties range from six months in jail to 99 years in prison.
The primary race in question saw Brown beat a primary challenger by just five votes, 1,047 to 1,042, the Longview News-Journal reported – with 787 mail-in ballots cast.
This year there’s been no shortage of issues with mail-in voting. As John Hawkins noted:
- In Nevada, more than 223k ballots were returned undelivered and over 100k were sent back in little Rhode Island.
- In New York, large numbers of ballots were rejected. “19% in Queens and Manhattan and 28% in Brooklyn.” Additionally, they didn’t declare a winner in some races for a MONTH AFTERWARDS.
- In Paterson, New Jersey, 20% of the ballots were rejected and 4 men were charged with voter fraud. In Michigan this year, over 10,000 ballots were rejected and 846 ballots from dead voters were found. 40,000 ballots were rejected in Michigan and another 23,000 ballots didn’t make the cut in Wisconsin.
- Overall, the Washington Post noted over half a million ballots were rejected across 23 states this year.
The greatest problem with mail-in voting on the national level may not even be fraud, but rather government logistics. Over 1.1 million coronavirus relief stimulus checks were recently sent to dead people – how do we know the same wouldn’t happen with ballots? While the 1.1 million sent to the wrong people accounted for only 0.5% of stimulus checks sent (by dollar value), a 0.5% error margin is more than enough to make a difference in an election (particularly in swing states). And that’s just the potential error rate for people receiving the wrong ballot. The USPS’ lost mail rate has to be added onto that, which unfortunately isn’t known.
Swing states like Michigan were decided by a minuscule 0.3% margin (with Trump garnering 13,080 more votes) in 2016, while New Hampshire was decided by a mere 2,701 votes. How does anyone think the results in those states would be received in a situation where tens of thousands of ballots had to be disqualified?
