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LAS VEGAS (AP) – Even before Attorney General William Barr issued a memo that authorized federal prosecutors across the country to investigate “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities if they exist, the Justice Department had already begun to consider two specific allegations.
One was a claim by the Trump campaign that thousands of people may have voted inappropriately. The other was an allegation by a Pennsylvania postal worker that a postmaster asked workers to back-date ballots posted after polling day.
But so far neither case appears to contain much water, according to probe details. And the first charge worried U.S. military personnel in Nevada that they had been drawn into unsubstantiated fraud allegations.
There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election despite President Donald Trump’s claims. In fact, election officials from both political parties have publicly stated that the election went well and international observers have confirmed that there were no serious irregularities that elected Democrat Joe Biden as the next president. .
Still, lawyers for Trump’s campaign sent Barr a letter, claiming they discovered what they described as “criminal election fraud” in Nevada and claiming they had identified 3,062 people who had ” incorrectly “mail-in vote in Clark County, a densely populated Democratic area that includes Las Vegas and about 75 percent of the state’s population.
These people were identified by “crossing the names and addresses of voters with the national change of address database,” according to the letter.
A copy of the Nevada letter provided to The Associated Press included a 62-page table listing each voter, but the list did not include the name, address or party affiliation. Instead, it listed voters by county, city, state, and zip code they moved to, as well as the city, state, and nine-digit zip code they moved to. The complete nine-digit zip code can narrow an address to a particular segment of a few blocks or even one side of a street, according to the U.S. Postal Service.
With Biden leading Trump to wide margins in the major battlefield states, none of these issues would impact the election outcome, including Nevada. and Pennsylvania, where Biden won 37,000 votes and 54,000 votes, respectively.
But voting rights activists say hundreds of people on the list appear to be linked to the U.S. military. The Nevada Civil Liberties Union, which does election protection work, found 157 voters who listed a military base post office, according to attorney Nikki Levy, meaning they likely voted legally. under the additional protections of federal law allowing postal voting for military personnel and their families.
Nevada Election Law states that in order to register to vote, a person must have been a resident for 30 days prior to an election, but does not specify how long an already registered voter must be physically present in the state in order to participate in the election. an election. .
The Nevada Secretary of State’s office said voters do not lose their eligibility to vote or cancel their registration when they leave the state temporarily, even for long periods, and can travel for 30 days or more while voting.
Federal and state law allows otherwise eligible voters to be exempt from any requirement that they reside in a state for any length of time in order to vote in a presidential election. A citizen who moves within 30 days of an election has the right to vote in his new state or in his former state of residence. Voters who take advantage of this vote only for the president and vice-president. They cannot vote in any other contest.
Clark County Registrar of Electors Joe Gloria responded to the Trump campaign’s allegations at a press conference last week, saying his office was reviewing a list of names the campaign sent him, but that the The allegation implied “something that happens regularly”.
“You don’t have to live here to be able to vote here. It’s a military town, ”he said, referring to Nellis Air Force Base, located northeast of Las Vegas. He also noted that Nevadans who leave the state for college often vote by mail. Students and military families, although not physically in the state, “have the right to vote here in Nevada,” he said.
It’s difficult to casually know how many military families are on the Trump campaign’s list because not all members of the service use their home post office as their address, the ACLU attorney said, Levy. This includes voters living in towns where there are military installations and it probably also includes a good number of students, she said.
Rebekah Mattes, an official who now lives in Stuttgart, Germany, said she believed she ended up with her husband, who is in the Air Force, on the list because she only understands two voters who made the same move as they did from north Las Vegas to their new postcode in Germany.
“It’s a little disheartening that this process that is in place for people like my family to be able to exercise their right to vote is being challenged,” said Mattes.
Mattes said postal voting was something she and her family relied on to grow up while her father was in the Air Force. She said it was concerning that it appeared her vote was branded as potentially fraudulent, along with hundreds of others with nothing to base it on.
“It’s a large enough brush to paint for something so important,” she says.
His comments were echoed by other military families who had similar concerns. Some have raised security concerns over details of their old residences and their new linked and published nine-digit zip codes.
Justice officials did not comment on the investigation.
Shortly after the letter was sent by the Trump campaign, Barr gave prosecutors an opportunity to circumvent long-standing Justice Department policy that would normally ban such overt actions before the election was certified. Shortly after its publication, the department’s top electoral crime official announced he would be stepping down from the post due to the memo.
The problems reported by the Trump campaign and his allies are typical of every election: problems with signatures, secret envelopes and postmarks on ballots in the mail, as well as the possibility of a small number of ballots. incorrect or lost votes.
Trump’s campaign also launched legal challenges complaining that their poll observers were unable to review the voting process. Many of these challenges were dismissed by the judges, some within hours of being tabled; and again, none of the complaints show any evidence that the outcome of the election was affected.
Another active investigation in Pennsylvania, meanwhile, appears to have collapsed after the employee retracted the allegations during an interview with the Postal Service’s Inspector General’s office, people familiar with the matter said. Making a materially false statement to a federal agent is a federal crime. People were not allowed to speak about an ongoing investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
The employee, Richard Hopkins, admitted in an interview with the Postal Service Inspector General that the allegations were based on portions of a conversation he overheard among colleagues at the mail establishment where he works at Erie. He also said that an affidavit cited by Senator Lindsey Graham, RS.C., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee – and forwarded to the Justice Department by Graham – was drafted by Project Veritas, a Tory group that promoted charges of electoral fraud. on social networks.
He agreed that some of the statements in the affidavit should have included changes or caveats and also agreed to sign a new statement that went against some of his main claims in the original affidavit, according to one. recording of the interview published by Project Veritas.
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Balsamo brought from Washington, and Izaguirre from Lindenhurst, NY
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