I have taken this story to heart since the first time I read about the initial raid on the IVRP by the Indiana State Police on October 4th. For a long time it was mostly ignored, just Meteor Blades, me, and a couple of local papers giving it any life at all. But now it appears that it’s finally starting to get more attention nationally.
The Huffington Post has an ARTICLE out today showing just how flimsy the entire investigation is. Just to quickly recap for newcomers, on October 4th, working on information provided by a couple of County Clerks about possibly faulty or fraudulent applications turned in, the ISP executed a search warrant on the headquarters of the Indiana Voter Registration Project, seizing applications, laptops, paperwork and even personal cell phones. They barred access to the office by an attorney during the raid, and they lined volunteers up against the wall. They expanded their investigation from two counties to 56, even though IVRP only had activity in nine counties.
The cracks started appearing in the cover story almost immediately. The ISP raided based on information by County Clerks, but the IVRP insisted that they had followed the law and flagged about a dozen applications as being faulty, asking the clerks to inspect them as part of their process. In other words, they self disclosed. Kind of sounds like a piss poor way to go about committing voter fraud, putting a big red flag on it. And third party registrars are required to turn in every application that they collect, to prevent applications from being discarded due to political preference. They must flag suspicious applications, which the IVRP clearly did. Where’s the fire?
Turns out there is none. The County Clerks, and even the Secretary of State admitted that there was no clear evidence of fraud, most of the glitches were inverted numbers, or a blank or incomplete zip code or phone number. Dumb ass human error actually. There were no applications that appeared to be made up out of whole cloth. But the ISP had an ace up their sleeve. It was an obscure, almost universally unpublished technical phrase that the ISP latched on to. To quote the article;
Indiana law requires that a person who receives a voter registration application they have “reason to believe” is false, fictitious or fraudulent submit the application “with a statement sworn or affirmed to under the penalties for perjury, setting forth the reasons why the person believes the application may be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent.”
That’s it. Period. An obscure clause that doesn’t even appear in the on the SoS voter registration handbook online, and is only mentioned in the registration handbook in one lousy county in the state. How do you comply with a rule that nobody in the state tells you exists? And how does a volunteer submit a sworn statement, under penalty of perjury that a registration is fraudulent when they have no proof, only the knowledge that it may contain inaccurate information? But there’s one more golden nugget in the Huffington Post report. The Indiana State Police has no business being involved in this!
And it gets more complicated. Under the law, the state police don’t seem to have a role in an investigation into a potential fraudulent voter registration form. Instead, it is up to the county election board to investigate before turning any findings over to a prosecutor.
Do you believe this? 5-10,000 confiscated applications, another 40-45,000 already turned in at jeopardy, and the ISP has no jurisdiction over this matter?!? Jon Stewart always says, “If you smell bullshit, call bullshit”. And this is pure, unadulterated bullshit. The capper is that Mike Pence, at a rally in Iowa last week bragged about the partisan, racist witch hunt his cops are on. The people of Indiana deserve better than this from their government.
Thanks as always for reading, you are ALL the wind beneath my wings.
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