Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz (R) has spent 18 months and
almost $150,000 fulfilling his promise to make “ballot security” a top
priority in Iowa.

To date, his investigation has yielded 5 guilty pleas and 5
dismissals.

Schultz is one of many Republicans who rode into office promising to
curtail the non-existent plague of fraudulent voting.

His critics claim that all he’s proven is that what little fraud
exists is statistically insignificant, but he told The Des Moines
Register that “[b]efore, the narrative was that there’s no such thing
as voter fraud. That’s obviously changed. Iowans expect us to do
something when we know there’s a problem.”

Schultz has claimed that there is “a lot” of voter fraud in Iowa, and
that his investigative team was sorting through a “mountain” of
evidence of it. The five guilty pleas that resulted from the
investigation do not constitute evidence of a systemic effort to
violate Iowans’ “sacred” voting privilege.

One woman, Beth Ann Gallagher, cast an absentee ballot on behalf of
her daughter, who had recently moved to Minnesota and thought she
wouldn’t be eligible to vote there. However, after she mailed the
ballot, her daughter texted her that she had been eligible to vote, at
which time Gallagher self-reported the incident to the Delaware County
auditor’s office. She plead guilty and paid a $147.75 fine.

A man, Terry Hambrick, registered via the Motor Voter Act while
attempting to steal his dead brother’s identity. Hambrick was trying
to acquire a driver’s license under the name of a brother who had died
of sudden infant death syndrome in 1991, and accidentally registered
to vote. He was caught not by Schultz’s probe, but after he was
arrested for drunk driving and law enforcement officials determined
that he was, in fact, Terry Hambrick.

Another man who pleaded guilty, Jason Rawlin, was also a victim of the
Motor Voter Act. Rawlin, a felon, was attempting to acquire a
nonoperator ID card, he registered to vote without realizing that he
attested to not being a felon. When he received a voter card in the
mail, he self-reported to authorities. Schultz initially charged
Rawlin with felony election misconduct, but he ultimately plead guilty
to misdemeanor fraudulent practices.

The two other guilty pleas were also from convicted felons, neither of
whom knew that their voting rights had not been restored. Five other
cases are currently pending.


Pretty compelling stuff, eh? 5 cases for all his time and $150,000 in
costs.

This is the trumped up bull**** that Republicans are using in hopes of
disenfranchising voters through ID laws. Funny thing is that it's
energizing voters to get to the polls who would otherwise be
complacent.

Thanks, assholes!