James O’Keefe Says $50K Donation Funded Voter Fraud Stunt
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The art of agitprop normally calls for using a partial truth to tell a lie, and that was the case when James O’Keefe and cohorts showed up in New Hampshire once again breaking the law to prove a false hypothetical. They did this to further another far right fear myth used to justify GOP grandstanding in state legislatures.
The myth / conspiracy they are trying to propagate to coordinate with legislation is that dead people are voting. Variations of the myth portray unions, acorn, teachers, or whoever the GOP is currently demonizing as busing vagrants/welfare moms/sluts/immigrants, or whoever else the GOP is currently demonizing, to multiple polling stations to vote over and over again. The actual cases of voter fraud are infinitesimally small, and in fact with this stunt O’keefe and co. have probably created a spike on that chart, and they need to be prosecuted for it.
This is a two pronged attack on the institution of voting - in various state legislatures GOP members are pushing bills to make it more difficult to vote, and they are using Leadership Institute groomed liars like O’Keefe to justify that. When you are on the far right or far left you have to tear down every day institutions and process to justify your often insane causes — because if things like the courts, federal agencies, and the voting process actually work then you don’t need loons or wingnuts like O’Keefe and gang.
An “extremely generous donor” gave $50,000 to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas to fund their voter fraud stunt in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the conservative activist said in a email to supporters.
“Our Voter Fraud investigation is being funded with a gift of $50,000 from an extremely generous donor — but that covers the cost of just ONE national project,” O’Keefe wrote in a fundraising email.
Project Veritas received non-profit status from the IRS and said in an application that it wanted to raise $1.65 million over a three year period. A $50,000 donation will likely show up on the organization’s yearly 990 forms, but that information wouldn’t be available until this spring or the spring of 2013, depending upon if the donation was made in 2011 or 2012.
O’Keefe wrote in the email that his team had the “ability to cast more than a dozen votes” in what is one of the only known cases of a coordinated attempt at in-person voter fraud. Conservatives touted the project as evidence of the need for voter ID laws, though election experts said other polling station methods could have prevented such a scheme from taking place.
A federal prosecutor in New Hampshire is reviewing the video and election law experts told TPM that O’Keefe’s allies could potentially face charges for obtaining ballots in the name of deceased individuals.