Ohio vote fraud underway

Columbus Dispatch:

A small, unremarkable house on the East Side seems as anonymous as any other on its working-class street.

But as authorities investigate the rental home's current and former residents for possible voter fraud, it has become a focal point for questions about the integrity of Ohio's election system heading into the presidential election.

Some critics of Ohio's election system now question whether lax residency requirements and election laws are creating loopholes for outsiders to vote in this battleground state.

By late summer, the house at 2885 Brownlee Ave. had become headquarters for a group of 20- and 30-somethings who came to Ohio with a lofty goal: to register as many as 10,000 new voters in traditionally Democratic precincts on the East Side.

About 200,000 newly registered Ohio voters have been flagged by the secretary of state because their names, addresses, driver's-license numbers, and/or Social Security numbers don't match other state or federal records.

Likely among them are the 12 people who have registered to vote since August using the address of the 1,175-square-foot Brownlee Avenue house.

Some of them already have voted. Others requested absentee ballots but have yet to return them to the Franklin County Board of Elections.

None of them, however, seems to have ties to Ohio -- no close relatives, no public-records trail, no obvious intention to stay in the state past the election.

Most of them grew up on the East Coast, attended colleges there and registered to vote in their home counties. It is not illegal to be registered to vote in more than one state. But it is illegal to vote in more than one or to vote in a state that is not your permanent residence.

The owner of the house also is coming under scrutiny. He has voted in Ohio even though he has lived and worked in New York since 2004.

...

"Is this the tip of the iceberg or an isolated incident? Nobody knows," Smith said. "But it doesn't look good. It doesn't pass the smell test. And it undermines the confidence in the voting system."

The inhabitants of the Brownlee Avenue house aren't talking anymore. A woman who answered the door Friday peered from behind a Halloween decoration duct-taped to the screen door and said, "No comment," before slamming and bolting the door. A visit earlier in the week drew a similar response, and attempts to contact members of the group through other means were unsuccessful as well.

But some of the residents were interviewed by a Dispatch reporter during the last week of August and explained some of their intentions for Ohio.

"A group of us came up with the idea at Oxford. It's an opportunity for a new get-out-the-vote effort," said Marc Gustafson, a 31-year-old New York City resident who is a Marshall Scholar at the University of Oxford in England.

The plan, he said, was hatched in January.

...

There is more. If the NY Times would get out of its liberal cocoon and do some reporting on vote fraud rather than pretending it is not happening, this kind of stuff would come to the attention of more people who take their lead from that paper. There have been other examples in Ohio as well as New Mexico, not to mention all the fraudulent registrations done by ACORN. Election theft is a serious matter and it appears that in every case it is Democrats who are the perps.

Props to the Dispatch for doing some real reporting on the issue.