Following allegations of widespread fraud, intimidation of voters, and theft of ballots in the May 12 municipal election in Paterson, NJ, State Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal (pictured) announced Thursday that he is charging four men of electoral fraud, including the vice president of the City Council and a candidate for that body.
With careers still undecided, council control hangs in the balance. Paterson is New Jersey’s third-largest city, and elections will decide the fate of a municipal budget in excess of $ 300 million, plus hundreds of millions more in education and state aid spending.
In the City Council election, 16,747 mail ballots were received, but only 13,557 votes were counted. More than 3,190 votes, 19% of the total votes cast, were disqualified by the electoral board. Due to the pandemic, Paterson’s election was made by vote by mail. Community organizations, such as the city’s NAACP chapter, are calling for all elections to be invalidated.
Voting by mail has been recognized by voting experts as being more susceptible to fraud and irregularities than voting in person. This has raised concerns from President Trump and other Republicans about the integrity of the national elections in November, which are expected to include a dramatic increase in mail ballots. If Paterson is a guide, it should worry Democrats, too.
More than 800 ballots in Paterson were invalidated for appearing in incorrectly grouped mailboxes, including one mailbox where hundreds of ballots were in a single package. The packages were turned over to the police to investigate possible criminal activities related to collecting the ballots.
The electoral board disqualified another 2,300 ballots after concluding that the signatures on them did not match the signatures on the voter records.
The NBC reports further uncovered Paterson’s citizens who are listed as voters, but who told the news outlet that they never received a ballot and did not vote. A woman, Ramona Javier, after being shown the list of people on her block who allegedly voted, told the media that she knew eight family members and neighbors who were on the wrong list. “We do not receive ballots by mail and therefore we do not vote,” he said. “This is corruption. This is fraud. “
There were multiple reports that large numbers of mail ballots were left on the lobby floors of apartment buildings and were not delivered to individual residents’ mailboxes, casting doubt on the integrity of the election.
Two of the electoral results in Paterson were particularly close. Initially, challenger Shahin Khalique defeated incumbent Mohammed Akhtaruzzaman by 1,729 votes to 1,721. After a second count on June 19, that run is now tied at 1,730-1,730. In that race, a video posted on Snapchat appeared that appears to show a man named Abu Razyen illegally handling a large stack of ballots that he says are votes for Khalique. Khalique’s brother Shelim and Razyen have been indicted by the state attorney general for crimes including fraud by casting ballots by mail, tampering and unauthorized possession of ballots.
Incumbent council member William McKoy lost by 240 votes to challenger Alex Mendez after a count on June 1. However, the McKoy-Méndez race is far from over: in the third neighborhood of the city where the race was decided, more than 24% of all the ballots were disqualified by the Electoral Board. Mendez was also charged Thursday with six different crimes related to electoral fraud. (Michael Jackson, titular of Paterson 1S t Ward, a city councilor and vice chairman of the council, was the fourth man charged yesterday. Jackson faces four counts related to voter fraud.)
In a legal complaint, the McKoy campaign alleges outright fraud on behalf of the Méndez campaign. “At least one individual, YaYa Luis Méndez, has confessed to investigators working on behalf of the [New Jersey attorney general’s] office to have stolen the ballots from the mailboxes, both complete and incomplete, in the name and under the direction of the [Alex] Mendez Campaign, “according to the complaint prepared by McKoy’s attorney Scott Salmon.
Méndez’s lawyer, who leads the vote count, is not contesting that the election results are unreliable. “This election is a sham, regardless of who the ultimate winners are, and this process must be reviewed by the courts to address deficiencies in the planning and execution of the elections,” said Gregg Paster, the attorney, in The Salmon Complaint. .
For his part, Paster alleges that the failed election has resulted in problems that undermine Méndez’s chance of winning. On June 8, Paster sent a letter asking federal authorities to investigate voter intimidation on behalf of Paterson Mayor Andre Sayegh and local law enforcement.
Méndez is part of a faction that opposes the mayor and hopes to gain control of the City Council and reject the mayor’s agenda. Subsequent investigations into voting irregularities have resulted in Paterson police officers, including those assigned to the mayor’s private details, according to Paster, knocking on doors and asking citizens about their votes. The local police department says the police officers were assisting the state attorney general’s investigation into the elections, serving as translators for different Spanish dialects.
“Once you start having the city police knock on doors, investigating voting patterns, you’re treading tremendously close to the banana republic-style line of tactics,” Paster told RealClearPolitics. “There is a factor of intimidation: there are many immigrants in Paterson, many people who come from places where if the police appear at your door, many times, you know, nobody will see you again. And while we are not alleging that local police officers are something like this, this is where many of these people have come from and are afraid of the police. ”
Salmon admits that the recent Paterson elections are “crazy,” but points to unique aspects of city life that make mail fraud more likely: It is one of the most densely populated cities in the United States, with many residents living in high-rise buildings. buildings that have communal mailboxes that are prime targets for theft of ballots.
But as noted in Salmon’s legal complaint, Paterson was just one of 31 municipalities in New Jersey that held vote-by-mail elections on May 12. The average disqualification rate for mail ballots in the 31 statewide elections was a staggering 9.6% (The ballot rejection rate drops to 8.1% if Paterson’s results are excluded).
New Jersey’s municipal elections are not broadly comparable to national elections for a variety of reasons, but the 2016 presidential election resulted in a total popular vote with a spread of just over 2%, with less than 80,000 votes in a handful of decisive states that determine the winner of the electoral college. The irregularities in ballot-by-mail voting could be much less pronounced than what happened in New Jersey last month and still create great uncertainty in national elections.
Salmon hopes that voting-by-mail problems will be resolved in the months leading up to the November election. “In New Jersey, people discovered that this will be a mail-in election just a month earlier, while obviously November is still a long way off and there is much more time to educate voters on how to fill out these ballots. and how to return them, ”he told RCP. But she acknowledges that “it is still a fair point” to look at the New Jersey elections last month and see concern about the national elections.
Rick Hasen, professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, acknowledged on the Election Law Blog last month that “a true scandal of absentee ballot fraud is occurring in Paterson, New Jersey, and it’s going to have a great national impact. ” Attention. “Hasen argues that it is not a cause for concern, however, he notes that there were only 491 absentee ballot-related prosecutions across the country between 2000 and 2012.
“The increase in postal voting should lead to increased vigilance against this type of activity,” he wrote May 20. “But the push to expand voting by mail is worth it given the great health benefits of increasing voting by mail during a pandemic.” , the small risk of fraud and the probability of fraud being caught. “
Despite Hasen’s optimistic attitude, the problems in Paterson have received virtually no national attention so far. Salmon and Paster say they have only received inquiries from two national media outlets, and almost all coverage of the problems and allegations of fraud in Paterson have been limited to the local media.
At the same time, dozens of lawsuits have been filed across the country challenging the state requirements used to certify mail ballots. “Primary objectives include witness and signature requirements for absentee ballots, such as signing the envelope, getting a witness or notary to sign it, or making sure the voter’s signature is legible,” notes an NPR report. earlier this month.
Lawsuits seeking to expand voting by mail include one filed in Nevada earlier this year., The goal of which is to completely eliminate signature verification on mail ballots, even though ballot signatures that do not match voter records was the reason why Paterson disqualified more than 2,300 ballots.
Meanwhile, the President continues to be an outspoken opponent of voting by mail. He tweeted on June 22: “2020 ADJUSTED ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAILING VOTES WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHERS. IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES! This and other statements by Trump about voting by mail problems are frequently questioned by the press.
“We have literally expected Trump to tweet about this for the past two weeks,” says Salmon. “Within the McCoy campaign, there have been continuous jokes about how long it will take Trump to find out about Paterson and start tweeting.”
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