The House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight committee met today at the capitol in St. Paul. The fraud examined was voter registration fraud and the state agency overseen was the Office of the Secretary of State (SOS). Committee Chair Kristin Robbins (R-Maple Grove) conducted the meeting.
The hearing was called to review events around the conviction this summer of two individuals for submitting between 500 and 600 fake voter registrations. The couple pled guilty in federal court to the felony charge of conspiracy to commit voter registration fraud. As of yet, neither has been sentenced.
Your correspondent (via Zoom) was the opening witness this morning. I described the conspiracy and named names: Ronnie Williams, Lorraine Combs, and their employer, the Anika Foundation. Apparently, Anika paid the fraudsters for the fake voter registrations by the each, which is, strictly speaking, not allowed. However, not all the facts of the case are publicly known.
The day’s only other witnesses were the elected secretary (Steve Simon) and his chief elections deputy. They ran through the checks and verifications done to make sure that only valid voters vote.
The Secretary and committee members ran through a number of hypotheticals where an ineligible voter could slip through the cracks.
What came out was a confirmation that voting, much like the rest of state government, is conducted based on the honor system. If an illegal alien wants to vote and is willing to lie to authorities to do it, she will be successful, and her vote will count.
What also became clear is that the recent fraud was caught (by Carver County) because of its sheer size and ineptness. Had the fraudsters been more clever, a different result may have occurred.
As with the multi-billion-dollar food and other frauds plaguing Minnesota, the voting system has little to no defense against a coordinated, industrial-scale assault. <cough, ballot harvesting, cough>
At one point committee member Rep. Emma Greenman (DFL-Minneapolis) conducted a mini-filibuster on gun control.
Some other public policy concerns that came out today and are worth further discussion:
- Why are nonprofits submitting voter registrations to election offices?
- Why are nonprofits, who are primarily taxpayer-funded, paying people to register voters?
- How do we know that they caught everybody?
- How do we know that they caught all of the fake registrations?
- Why did it take the feds to prosecute this case?
So many questions.