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Well, well, well.
Do you think those cringy scammers, James O’Keefe and Cam Higby, have enjoyed being hoisted by their own petard, as it were? Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has charged these malicious doofuses with two felonies each — identity theft and unlawful voting — for their little stunt during the August Minnesota primary.
O’Keefe and Higby, both conservative “activists,” showed up to the polls at multiple locations in Minneapolis in racist costumes, wearing faux-Muslim robes, affecting an Arabic accent, and generally being offensive all around. Using the names of real voters, none of whom knew about the scheme or permitted them to use their names, they asked at multiple precincts if they could vouch for people they had in tow to allow them to vote that day.
Their ostensible goal was to show that Minnesota’s vouching law, which allows a registered voter who resides in the precinct to vouch for up to eight potential voters, was a way for ineligible people to vote anyway. Those who vouch sign an oath, under penalty of perjury, with their name, signature, telephone number, and address, which gets attached to the potential voter’s registration card, which the law requires to be kept for at least 22 months.
But here’s the thing: vouching doesn’t magically erase the requirements for that potential voter, despite O’Keefe’s video misrepresenting the process to suggest that vouching allows a potential voter to register without any identification. Rather, even with someone vouching, the potential voter has to provide a Minnesota driver’s license or ID card or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Vouching usually happens when someone has moved but hasn’t updated their driver’s license yet, or for people who live in senior housing.
In other words, vouching ensures that otherwise-eligible voters aren’t disenfranchised.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon noted that during the 2024 general election, less than 0.6 percent of votes cast were by vouched-for voters, and about 71 percent of that small amount were people who were already registered but hadn’t yet updated their name or address.
But in the overheated minds of people like O’Keefe and Higby, it’s somehow a way to smuggle in noncitizen voters en masse — or, as Higby smugly put it, “how Minnesota abuses votes.”
O’Keefe, of course, is no stranger to being charged with a crime for his so-called journalism. In 2010, he, along with two other men, was arrested after showing up at the office of then-Sen. Mary Landrieu dressed as telephone repairmen, saying they needed to work on the telephone system. O’Keefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses and got three years of probation.
O’Keefe hasn’t commented on his current felony charges, but his co-conspirator has, and you can see why Higby thinks they’re in the clear: “I never voted, I never signed an affidavit, and I never violated a law.”
Hmm. Who should you believe? This 26-year-old content-creator goblin or Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty?
Let’s run down why Higby is wrong.
FAFO
The criminal complaints against O’Keefe and Higby are functionally the same. Both face two felony charges.
First, they’re charged with identity theft in violation of Minnesota Statute 609.527 subd. 2: “A person who transfers, possesses, or uses an identity that is not the person’s own, with the intent to commit, aid, or abet any unlawful activity is guilty of identity theft.” Next, they’re both charged with unlawful voting under Minnesota Statute 204C.14 subd. 1(a): “No individual shall intentionally: misrepresent the individual’s identity in applying for a ballot, depositing a ballot in a ballot box or attempting to vote by means of a voting machine or electronic voting system.”
The complaint details what actually happened, versus the heavily edited, deceptive video that O’Keefe and Higby released. They went to three different Minneapolis precincts and tried roughly the same nonsense at all three. From the complaint:
Video depicts Defendant Higby, dressed in clothing to disguise his identity, entering the polling place and repeatedly falsely identifying himself to the election judges as Identity Theft Victim 1, a registered voter in that precinct. Had Defendant Higby truthfully identified himself as a non-resident present at the polls to explore Minnesota’s voting laws, he would not have been allowed in the polling location. Election judges allowed Defendant Higby to apply for a ballot because he used the stolen identity of a pre-registered Minnesota voter. Defendant Higby, however, was prevented from falsely voting by election judges, when he refused to sign the appropriate paperwork.
It’s clear Higby thinks he didn’t commit a crime because he didn’t sign anything, but that’s not what Minnesota’s identity theft or election law requires. He used a stolen identity to gain access to a polling place, and what Higby seems to have missed, but is detailed in the complaint, is that Minnesota doesn’t let non-resident randos come into a polling place on election day to ask questions.
If you aren’t election-related personnel or a challenger, you can only be there to vote, update your registration, register to vote, vouch for someone, or assist someone with a disability or who can’t read English. It doesn’t matter that Higby never signed paperwork — he’d already committed the crime.
At another location, O’Keefe went to the table where registered voters apply for ballots, gave the election judge the name of someone registered in that precinct who had not consented and was not part of the scheme, and then began to quiz the election judges about the vouching procedure. According to the Minnesota Secretary of State, that is the first step in applying for a ballot as a pre-registered voter: giving your name and address to an election judge and answering questions about who you are and where you live. As with Higby, it doesn’t matter that O’Keefe didn’t actually get a ballot or actually sign anything — he’d already committed the crime.
All that O’Keefe and Higby managed to show, in the end, is that Minnesota’s voting laws are actually constructed such that it’s a felony to try to circumvent them even without signing an affidavit or swearing an oath. They didn’t manage to show that anyone could vouch for anyone, because they wimped out when they thought they would be committing a crime — signing an oath. And even if they had done that to vouch for the random people with them, those folks would still need to produce Minnesota identification or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
That’s what O’Keefe and Higby fail to understand about vouching in Minnesota. You can’t vouch for noncitizens or nonresidents, because all you are doing when you vouch for someone in Minnesota is saying that you know they live at a particular address in the precinct. They still have to prove they are who they say they are and that they are eligible to vote. And someone who has been vouched for can’t vouch for other people.
There’s no world where their fever dream of an endless string of noncitizens vouching for each other can happen.
You can expect people to howl that O’Keefe and Higby are only being prosecuted because they are conservatives, and that Minnesota otherwise lets vote fraudsters off scott free. But here’s the thing: Minnesota does prosecute voter fraud cases. It’s just that voter fraud is vanishingly rare.
Every election has a handful of voter fraud cases, and since 2020, there have been 123 of them, half of which were about an ineligible voter knowingly voting anyway. People have been prosecuted for knowingly voting twice and for voting while holding only a green card. In the past, some prosecutions were of felons who were not eligible to vote, but Minnesota passed a law in 2023 that made anyone not currently incarcerated for a felony eligible to vote.
Higby and O’Keefe might have considered looking into Minnesota’s laws about prosecuting voter fraud a little more carefully before their ill-conceived sting.
Once Secretary of State Steve Simon informed Moriarity about the duo’s antics, she didn’t have much discretion to just handwave it away. Minnesota law requires the county attorney to “proceed according to the generally applicable standards regarding the prosecutorial functions and duties of a county attorney.” That might sound like it gives county attorneys some wiggle room, but the law goes on to say that a county attorney “who refuses or intentionally fails to faithfully perform this or any other duty imposed by this chapter is guilty of a misdemeanor and upon conviction must forfeit office.”
When faced with something like O’Keefe and Higby’s deliberate violation of Minnesota law, Moriarty would have been foolish to ignore it and risk facing criminal charges herself. That provision of Minnesota law exists precisely so that voter fraud cases are taken seriously. Imagine a world where two Muslim noncitizens engaged in the antics that O’Keefe and Higby did and a progressive county attorney declined to do anything about it. You would hear the conservative howling from space.
A conspiracy theory in search of a problem
It isn’t happenstance that O’Keefe and Higby pretended to be Muslim, because the whole point was to feed red meat to their racist followers by showing that scary brown foreigners are lying to ensure more scary brown foreigners vote.
It isn’t happenstance they picked Minneapolis, a city with a large population of Somalis who are naturalized citizens. It isn’t happenstance they picked Minnesota, a state the federal government laid siege to in large part thanks to a conservative influencer video full of rancid, racist lies. (Though to be scrupulously fair to O’Keefe and Higby, they did just try the same stunt in Palm Beach County, Florida, where vouching is not legal.)
O’Keefe and his ilk are convinced that noncitizens vote in droves, but it simply isn’t true in Minnesota or anywhere else. One study in Minnesota looked at nine years of voting, from 2015 to 2024, and found three convictions of green card holders out of over 13 million general and primary ballots. A 2017 Brennan Center study of 23.5 million votes in 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 general election found an estimated 30 suspected noncitizen votes referred for further investigation or prosecution, or 0.0001 percent.
There is one group of people that seems to routinely flout voting laws, and it isn’t noncitizens — it’s Republicans like Scott Presler, an “election integrity” guy who is kind enough to let multiple GOP operatives use his address in Pennsylvania, a swing state, to vote. It’s Republicans like Jack Posobiec, who lives in Maryland but has used his parents’ address in Pennsylvania to vote there since 2004. It’s Republicans like Steve Bannon, who used a vacant home in Florida as his registered voting address.
What people like O’Keefe and President Donald Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche and everyone else pretending that noncitizen voting is rampant are actually mad about is that they simply don’t believe everyone should be allowed to vote. They are eager to make it harder for naturalized citizens to vote. They are eager to make it harder for poor people to vote. They are eager to make it harder for young people to vote. They’re happy to disenfranchise eligible voters as part of their quest to ferret out all those nonexistent ineligible voters.
And that’s another reason these folks are so fixated on Minnesota’s elections: it’s a state that strives to ensure that as many eligible voters as possible get to vote. That’s why the state has vouching. That’s why the state has same-day voter registration. That’s why the state does not disenfranchise people with felonies. And that’s why the state routinely has the highest voter turnout in the country. No amount of stings by has-beens like O’Keefe is going to change that.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Lisa Needham on the ball in defence of democracy as always...
Time for them to go to jail for election fraud.