RedState.com is reporting that O'Keefe's Project Veritas sent several people to New Hampshire polling places claiming to be citizens who had actually died within the last few months. While secretly filming exchanges with volunteers at the polling places, in almost every case, they were given ballots to vote after doing nothing more than stating their name and address.
The incident has sparked an increasing controversy over whether or not states should provide photo ID in order to eliminate at least some of the rampant voter fraud perpetuated by groups such as ACORN during the last election.
This is the last kind of controversy New Hampshire governor John H. Lynch wants in his state, especially after he vetoed a Voter ID law this summer that would have made O'Keefe's sting backfire.
"There is no voter fraud problem in New Hampshire," Lynch said this summer. "We already have strong elections laws that are effective in regulating our elections."
Apparently, they're not strong enough and O'Keefe's video has made that even more clear than it was before, effectively undercutting arguments that requiring a special ID could disenfranchise some voters.
"Governor John Lynch and Secretary of State Bill Gardner very publicly had their political pants pulled down with O'Keefe's project veritas video," said NHInsider blogger, Richard Olson, Jr. " . . . (I)rrespective of what O'Keefe's politics are, his video exposé undercuts the push-back of anti-voter I.D. foes."
Olson goes on to criticize the governor and attorney general for threatening to sue O'Keefe because NH state law makes it a crime to use a false name to obtain a ballot and to audio-record anyone without their consent.
However, O'Keefe told The Daily Caller that no laws were broken during the investigation and that his team members never claimed to be the dead people whose ballots they were trying to obtain. Instead, they carefully worded the way they asked for ballots, phrasing it like: “Do you have Earnest Chavanelle?” and “Do you have Paul Soucy?”
“We decided to go in there without using any false pretenses,” O'Keefe said. “There’s no misrepresentation in these videos if you watch them — we didn’t lie about who we were.”
In addition, none of the volunteers actually used the ballots to vote, but left the polling places without casting them.
O’Keefe, who plans to post full, unedited videos of the encounters, said: “It shows the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised.”
The widow of one of the deceased used in the sting, Rachel Groux, was horrified when she learned that her husband Roger, who died Dec. 31 at an assisted living facility, was used at the polls to obtain a ballot.
"That's awful," Groux told the Boston Herald. "Why should they use his name? They shouldn't use anybody's name - alive or deceased."
City officials agree. “Obviously it’s disturbing that anyone would be going out to any polling place anywhere using a dead person’s name,” said Manchester City Clerk Matthew Normand. Because Groux died just 10 days prior to the primary, the town had not yet removed his name from the voter rolls.
Which is precisely why voter ID should be required, many say. As Red State points out, workers at the polls were relying on printouts, not computers, which means the records are going to be at leaset somewhat out of date. "And that means that if you want to double-vote in New Hampshire, all you need to know is the name and address of somebody still on the voting rolls who you know isn’t going to vote."
This is why the results of O'Keefe's sting should be greeted with concern rather than dismissed, Olson says.
"Nobody is stepping up to say, 'Hey, James O'Keefe demonstrated a serious flaw and weakness in our voting system'," Olson says. "No fraudulent votes were cast during this exercise, so O'Keefe should not be prosecuted. It was not O'Keefe's intent to commit a crime, it was intent to expose a weakness and he did that."
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