How many times did you vote this year? Once? Twice? None at all? Before you call that a silly question, perhaps you should check your voter registration and any absentee ballots that may have been submitted in your name – or any names you may have once had in any state you have ever lived. According to a blogger who goes by Lauren, someone used her mother’s maiden name to vote absentee in Michigan, where she had lived many years before.
Now #MaidenGate - so named because it alleges that maiden names are being used to set up fraudulent votes - has gone viral, and both support and additional claims began pouring in, as did the criticism from the left-wing media and their experts. MaidenGate: Is it another face of election fraud, or merely the latest conspiracy theory?
It’s All in Who You Ask
Type in “MaidenGate” in the DuckDuckGo search engine, and you’ll see links to some stories clearly biased in favor of the MaidenGate claim and some clearly biased against it. You’ll even find one or two that appear to be fairly balanced reporting and a link to the actual MaidenGate Google Doc.
What do we get from Google search results?
“No Proof People Stole Maiden Names to Vote” from The New York Times.
“Twitter warriors allege US election fraud committed by hijacking of changed names … others label claim a ‘conspiracy’” from DHT News.
“Tracking 2020 Election Results Viral Disinformation” also from The New York Times.
“Right-Wing Social Media Influencers Fuel #Maidengate Conspiracy, Plan Saturday Protests” from PR Watch.
There’s even a link to an irrelevant – but equally biased – story from The Boston Globe claiming the USPS whistleblower fabricated his claims and a story from AZCentral.com titled, “Rep. Andy Biggs wants Congress to appoint a president? How convenient.”
The Democratic Party’s media machine labels this as it does all accusations of voter fraud, no matter how credible: unfounded and baseless. As Liberty Nation’s Mark Angelides explained, “The use of the terms ‘unfounded’ and ‘baseless’ by a media outlet with a demonstrated bias do not make such proclamations so.” Up to this point, these allegations appear to lack much in the way of evidence, and it is impossible to say how many votes could have been affected. Of course, even with sworn witnesses, photos, videos, or ballots submitted for people who have been dead for years, no charge of voter fraud seems capable of passing muster for the media – even those credible enough for DOJ investigations.
Evidently, it’s all in who you ask.
Double Voting – and Proud of It!
While Liberty Nation can’t substantiate these claims, it would be irresponsible to merely dismiss them out of hand. You see, double voting is real – and in some states, it’s not even a crime. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), double voting is, as the name suggests, one person voting twice in the same election. Most of the country forbids this, in some way or other, but the problem lies in how one defines “the same election.”
“Voting twice in the same election” is prohibited in 31 states. “Voting twice within the state or for the same office” is illegal in seven states, and “voting in more than one state” is a crime in 11 states. For those of you who have done the math and realize this is only 49 states, that’s because Indiana doesn’t explicitly mention voting twice.
In many of these states, double voting is a felony. This means that, at the individual voter level, it doesn’t make much sense. Why risk a criminal record and year in prison over a single extra vote for your guy? Most of the time, when one person appears to have voted twice in the same state – especially with in-person voting – it’s a clerical error. But what if the same person votes in two states, neither of which prohibit voting in other states? In this case, according to the NCSL, no crime has been committed. There’s no federal law against having open voter registration status in two states. Even in less specific instances, it would come down to how that jurisdiction defines “the same election” or “voting more than once.”
So are people voting twice? Well, the Georgia secretary of state is investigating 1,000 cases of alleged double voting from the primaries, and evidently some folks have even been bragging on social media about their fraud! Should this be surprising though? A 2012 post on Twitchy showcased half a dozen tweets in which the posters claimed to have voted twice or even thrice in that year's presidential election.
Still the risk v. reward potential of fraudulent voting really only pans out when we’re talking absentee ballots – which can be mass produced. The dead aren’t voting, claims the media, despite there being actual ballots certified as valid in this very election only to later be discovered to be submitted from beyond the grave. So if frauds are willing to help the dead keep voting – what makes it so unbelievable that they might do so for the living?
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Read more from James Fite.
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