Stealing Votes from the Very Vulnerable – Nursing Home Voter Fraud
by Liberato.US
originally published in The Truth – June 2016
Updates Below
Week 1
In August 2012, Deisy Penton de Cabrera of Florida was charged with criminal absentee-ballot fraud. Detectives followed her into a nursing home where she went into the room of a woman later determined to be unresponsive. When detectives greeted her, she simply stared off into space. They followed Cabrera into five more assisted-living facilities before stopping her and finding 12 absentee ballots on her person. Cabrera was suspected of casting 31 absentee ballots in all. Miami Herald
Voter fraud in nursing homes is real, and it has affected elections.
Liberals Admit This is a Problem
Even liberal media outlets admit voter fraud occurs in nursing homes. BillMoyers.com, Salon, NPR. The BillMoyers.com article is by Michael Waldman, president of the liberal Brennan Center which pushes the Left’s bogus ‘voter suppression’ narrative. The key admission in Waldman’s article is repeated on the Brennan Center website here.
More Cases
Chicago 1982 – Ballots were cast for seven nursing home residents who denied having voted. The signatures on their ballot applications were all forged. “In fact, one resident had no fingers or thumbs with which to write a signature.” Hans von Spakovsky
In 1998, former Democratic Rep. Austin Murphy of Pennsylvania was convicted of absentee voter fraud. "In this area there's a pattern of nursing-home administrators frequently forging ballots under residents' names," said Sean Cavanagh, a Democratic county supervisor who discovered he scandal. “Phantom Voters May Have Real Impact at Polls” by John Fund. Wall Street Journal, 23 Oct 2000: A.38.
Indiana in 2000 – a mayor and a city council member were charged with illegally collecting absentee ballots at nursing homes. They pled guilty and were fined. “Broken Ballot”, Wall Street Journal, 19 Dec 2000: A.1.
Virginia 2012 – A nursing home was investigated for voter fraud after an activities director became involved helping mentally impaired residents vote absentee. One, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, had not voted in 15 years and was unaware a vote had been cast in her name. Virginia Watchdog.org
Another apparent case came to light in Wisconsin in 2012. MacIver Institute
A commenter (blankballot) to an NBC story wrote: “she would cast an absentee ballot from her home address and then get placed in a nursing home for election day and when the Democrat party worker showed up with the wheel chair accessible van she would get a ride to the polling place and cast an in person ballot using the bill from the nursing home as proof of residence in the precinct. She died very proud that she had been able to vote for Bill Clinton for president 4 times.
Just Last Year - A New Jersey court threw out election results in a 2015 city council race because the local Democratic chairwoman had engaged in pervasive and far-reaching voter fraud in nursing homes. myCentralJersey.com
If You Can’t Win, Rig the Game
Some of the people committing voter fraud in nursing homes are part of the Democratic Party political machine. SEIU members were instructed to tell nursing home residents that, if they don’t vote for Democrats, Republicans will take away their Medicare and Social Security benefits. The SEIU people were also advised to get jobs in nursing homes ahead of the 2012 election. Bull Elephant
Week 2
Expose Their Methods – The Ice Cream Social Ploy
Reagan George, president of the nonpartisan Virginia Voters Alliance, is very familiar with Democrat vote harvesting in nursing homes. He was told about one case involving an elderly woman who was put in a facility because she could no longer tell fact from fiction and was embezzled out of $40,000. Her daughter got wind that her mother was at a Democrat voter registration ‘ice cream social’ in the facility. “The woman really challenged the staff,” George said. “‘You’re not protecting her. She needs to be protected, like I’m paying you for. You know she isn’t capable of making these decisions,’” he paraphrased the daughter as saying.
“The Democrats hide behind the fact that you have to take someone before a judge to have them declared incompetent, and that’s not done in most cases,” George said. “But they’re so diminished in capacity, it’s easy for the Democrats to take advantage of them and harvest their votes.”
In 2012, VVA sent a letter to 1,500 nursing homes in Virginia offering his organization’s assistance in overseeing voter registration and absentee balloting for the state’s 55,000 nursing home residents. The letter informed nursing home administrators that problems had arisen during the 2008 election:
Our investigation into those reports found that operators, both internal and external to the facilities, have sought to use the HAVA (Helping America Vote Act) laws to 1) register voters (both real and imaginary) by mail without their permission, and 2) employ fraudulent absentee voting processes to perpetuate widespread instances of voter fraud.
“Unfortunately, facilities such as yours are often targeted under the guise of “helping” senior citizens, while really having the intention of stealing their vote,” the letter continued. Abuses include:
The letter urged administrators to conduct due diligence before inviting any organization into their facility to assist with the voting process.
VVA did not repeat the exercise because the response rate was so low. It’s possible that many nursing homes are complicit in the Democrats’ vote harvesting schemes, George said.
Week 3
Democrats Trying to Lock Up the Alzheimer’s Vote with ‘Voting Day’ Events
Is This Happening in Your Area? ([email protected])
It appears that the Democratic Party is trying to commandeer the voting process in nursing homes in at least one locale in Virginia, and perhaps elsewhere. A well-known Democratic operative asked a local voter registrar for blanket authority to fill out absentee ballot requests for nursing home residents, a Virginia citizen who serves as an election officer told The Truth. The operative also asked for authority to take possession of all such blank absentee ballots issued and to hold them until the Democratic Party can schedule a ‘Voting Day’ at each nursing home in the district. At ‘Voting day’ events, to be held shortly before the November election, representatives of the Democratic Party would ‘help’ the residents complete their ballots, i.e., assist them in casting their votes. At this writing, two members of the local election board in question are opposed to the Democrats’ request, but the matter is still pending.
The Democrat ‘Voting Day’ proposal does not call for the participation of any government official or representative of another political party. The participation of election officials would be required by law in some states, e.g., Maryland and Florida.
This news follows the report in The Truth last week about an ‘ice cream social’ the Democrats held in another nursing home in Virginia for purposes of ‘assisting’ nursing home residents (at least one of whom was mentally incapacitated) in the voting process.
Scheduling ‘Voting Day’ events is a clever, time-efficient way to harvest votes from nursing homes en masse, The Truth’s source pointed out. Previously, illicit vote harvesting in nursing homes was a hit-or-miss affair, relying on finding complicit nursing home administrators to work with one absentee ballot at a time. Under the pending request to the registrar in Virginia, however, vote harvesting becomes much more systematic, involving large numbers of ballots and the collection of all absentee votes in several nursing homes a day. But the operation would depend on intercepting residents’ U.S. mail in apparent violation of federal law, the Truth’s source suggested. Ballots addressed to nursing home residents would instead be handed to Democratic operatives, then collected and hand-delivered back to the registrar instead of being mailed. The intended progression from individual ballot to mass operation shows that the Democrats are becoming increasingly brazen in their attempts to commit voter fraud, the source said.
The Truth’s source speculated that the same operation is being rolled out in other places, perhaps in every county in the country where not prohibited by state law.
Heads-up to readers: Are the Democrats attempting this in your area? If the Democratic Party has mounted a nationwide operation, The Truth wants to know – [email protected]
More Evidence of Democrat Voter Fraud in Nursing Homes
The Democrats have a long history of voter fraud in nursing homes. In addition to the two incidents described above, The Truth cited three cases in its first story on the subject two weeks ago. Also, in 1998, a Democratic supervisor in Fayette County, Pa., Sean Cavanagh, reported that nursing home administrators frequently forge voter registrations and ballots in the names of their residents. Cavanagh was on the advisory board of a voter integrity project at the time. ) [“Eroding Elections”, Wall Street Journal, 3 Nov 1998: A22.]
The Truth’s source for the ‘Voting Day’ story above has personally witnessed suspicious circumstances pointing to voter fraud in nursing homes. Working with absentee ballots as an election officer, the source went to a nursing home to check on a number of ballots that had been received on one particular day. Election officers look to see if all the necessary information is provided on the ballot – name, address, date, signature, and witness signature. Noticing that several had come in that day with the same address and shaky or off-kilter handwriting indicating an aged person, the source determined the address to be a nursing home (it could have been an apartment building). Most bore the same witness signature, later determined to be a nursing home employee. On visiting the home, the source found many of the people supposedly casting absentee ballots were in fact demented or had diminished mental capacity. Some could not even tell that the source was in the same room with them. But these people supposedly voted a ballot and signed their name just a few days before. In Virginia, signed assistance forms must be sent in with the ballot if someone helped the voter with the process (Virginia Code 24.2-649 and 24.2-701). There were no assistance forms accompanying the ballots in question, the source said. One person was not at the home; she was in an ICU and had been there for two weeks, the source learned. Yet someone had apparently cast that person’s vote without their knowledge, the source said. The source has heard similar stories from other election officers in Virginia.
The Truth sent the assertions above to the communications director of the Democratic Party of Virginia for comment. There was no response by press time. The assertions stand unrebutted despite ample opportunity to dispute them, thus constituting constructive admissions of voter fraud on the part of Democrats.
Week 4
More Data Points
Stealing Elections One Dementia Patient at a Time
Some will dismiss the following stories as ‘just anecdotes’ but they are more properly viewed as additional data points, i.e., more tall mountains for the Democratic Party to jump over before it can claim it has rebutted the extensive case of nursing home voter fraud built against it in The Truth over the last four weeks.
The source of the ‘ice cream social’ story reported in The Truth earlier this month provided more detail about her mother’s case:
‘What Can I Do?’
The Truth’s coverage of nursing home voter fraud this month featured original investigative reporting, interviews, and a spectacular refusal by the Democratic Party of Virginia to comment on preparations for widespread nursing home voter fraud in Virginia. Wrapping up our coverage:
by Liberato.US
originally published in The Truth – June 2016
Updates Below
Week 1
In August 2012, Deisy Penton de Cabrera of Florida was charged with criminal absentee-ballot fraud. Detectives followed her into a nursing home where she went into the room of a woman later determined to be unresponsive. When detectives greeted her, she simply stared off into space. They followed Cabrera into five more assisted-living facilities before stopping her and finding 12 absentee ballots on her person. Cabrera was suspected of casting 31 absentee ballots in all. Miami Herald
Voter fraud in nursing homes is real, and it has affected elections.
Liberals Admit This is a Problem
Even liberal media outlets admit voter fraud occurs in nursing homes. BillMoyers.com, Salon, NPR. The BillMoyers.com article is by Michael Waldman, president of the liberal Brennan Center which pushes the Left’s bogus ‘voter suppression’ narrative. The key admission in Waldman’s article is repeated on the Brennan Center website here.
More Cases
Chicago 1982 – Ballots were cast for seven nursing home residents who denied having voted. The signatures on their ballot applications were all forged. “In fact, one resident had no fingers or thumbs with which to write a signature.” Hans von Spakovsky
In 1998, former Democratic Rep. Austin Murphy of Pennsylvania was convicted of absentee voter fraud. "In this area there's a pattern of nursing-home administrators frequently forging ballots under residents' names," said Sean Cavanagh, a Democratic county supervisor who discovered he scandal. “Phantom Voters May Have Real Impact at Polls” by John Fund. Wall Street Journal, 23 Oct 2000: A.38.
Indiana in 2000 – a mayor and a city council member were charged with illegally collecting absentee ballots at nursing homes. They pled guilty and were fined. “Broken Ballot”, Wall Street Journal, 19 Dec 2000: A.1.
Virginia 2012 – A nursing home was investigated for voter fraud after an activities director became involved helping mentally impaired residents vote absentee. One, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, had not voted in 15 years and was unaware a vote had been cast in her name. Virginia Watchdog.org
Another apparent case came to light in Wisconsin in 2012. MacIver Institute
A commenter (blankballot) to an NBC story wrote: “she would cast an absentee ballot from her home address and then get placed in a nursing home for election day and when the Democrat party worker showed up with the wheel chair accessible van she would get a ride to the polling place and cast an in person ballot using the bill from the nursing home as proof of residence in the precinct. She died very proud that she had been able to vote for Bill Clinton for president 4 times.
Just Last Year - A New Jersey court threw out election results in a 2015 city council race because the local Democratic chairwoman had engaged in pervasive and far-reaching voter fraud in nursing homes. myCentralJersey.com
If You Can’t Win, Rig the Game
Some of the people committing voter fraud in nursing homes are part of the Democratic Party political machine. SEIU members were instructed to tell nursing home residents that, if they don’t vote for Democrats, Republicans will take away their Medicare and Social Security benefits. The SEIU people were also advised to get jobs in nursing homes ahead of the 2012 election. Bull Elephant
Week 2
Expose Their Methods – The Ice Cream Social Ploy
Reagan George, president of the nonpartisan Virginia Voters Alliance, is very familiar with Democrat vote harvesting in nursing homes. He was told about one case involving an elderly woman who was put in a facility because she could no longer tell fact from fiction and was embezzled out of $40,000. Her daughter got wind that her mother was at a Democrat voter registration ‘ice cream social’ in the facility. “The woman really challenged the staff,” George said. “‘You’re not protecting her. She needs to be protected, like I’m paying you for. You know she isn’t capable of making these decisions,’” he paraphrased the daughter as saying.
“The Democrats hide behind the fact that you have to take someone before a judge to have them declared incompetent, and that’s not done in most cases,” George said. “But they’re so diminished in capacity, it’s easy for the Democrats to take advantage of them and harvest their votes.”
In 2012, VVA sent a letter to 1,500 nursing homes in Virginia offering his organization’s assistance in overseeing voter registration and absentee balloting for the state’s 55,000 nursing home residents. The letter informed nursing home administrators that problems had arisen during the 2008 election:
Our investigation into those reports found that operators, both internal and external to the facilities, have sought to use the HAVA (Helping America Vote Act) laws to 1) register voters (both real and imaginary) by mail without their permission, and 2) employ fraudulent absentee voting processes to perpetuate widespread instances of voter fraud.
“Unfortunately, facilities such as yours are often targeted under the guise of “helping” senior citizens, while really having the intention of stealing their vote,” the letter continued. Abuses include:
- “Registering patients or residents either without their knowledge or against their will.”
- “Registering patients who have been adjudicated incompetent and are thereby disqualified from participation in the electoral process.”
- “Applying for an absentee ballot either without the person’s knowledge or against such person’s will and inserting their organization as a “voting assistant” on the absentee ballot, again without the voters consent.”
- “Preparing self-serving ballots by persons other than the voter, marked for a single political party, so as to restrict the patient’s voting choice.”
- “Submitting a prepared ballot to a patient or resident for signature under circumstances that would clearly indicate that such person does not understand or appreciate the nature of their actions; in some instances, forging the person’s signature on the ballot; or, signing for recently deceased patients.”
The letter urged administrators to conduct due diligence before inviting any organization into their facility to assist with the voting process.
VVA did not repeat the exercise because the response rate was so low. It’s possible that many nursing homes are complicit in the Democrats’ vote harvesting schemes, George said.
Week 3
Democrats Trying to Lock Up the Alzheimer’s Vote with ‘Voting Day’ Events
Is This Happening in Your Area? ([email protected])
It appears that the Democratic Party is trying to commandeer the voting process in nursing homes in at least one locale in Virginia, and perhaps elsewhere. A well-known Democratic operative asked a local voter registrar for blanket authority to fill out absentee ballot requests for nursing home residents, a Virginia citizen who serves as an election officer told The Truth. The operative also asked for authority to take possession of all such blank absentee ballots issued and to hold them until the Democratic Party can schedule a ‘Voting Day’ at each nursing home in the district. At ‘Voting day’ events, to be held shortly before the November election, representatives of the Democratic Party would ‘help’ the residents complete their ballots, i.e., assist them in casting their votes. At this writing, two members of the local election board in question are opposed to the Democrats’ request, but the matter is still pending.
The Democrat ‘Voting Day’ proposal does not call for the participation of any government official or representative of another political party. The participation of election officials would be required by law in some states, e.g., Maryland and Florida.
This news follows the report in The Truth last week about an ‘ice cream social’ the Democrats held in another nursing home in Virginia for purposes of ‘assisting’ nursing home residents (at least one of whom was mentally incapacitated) in the voting process.
Scheduling ‘Voting Day’ events is a clever, time-efficient way to harvest votes from nursing homes en masse, The Truth’s source pointed out. Previously, illicit vote harvesting in nursing homes was a hit-or-miss affair, relying on finding complicit nursing home administrators to work with one absentee ballot at a time. Under the pending request to the registrar in Virginia, however, vote harvesting becomes much more systematic, involving large numbers of ballots and the collection of all absentee votes in several nursing homes a day. But the operation would depend on intercepting residents’ U.S. mail in apparent violation of federal law, the Truth’s source suggested. Ballots addressed to nursing home residents would instead be handed to Democratic operatives, then collected and hand-delivered back to the registrar instead of being mailed. The intended progression from individual ballot to mass operation shows that the Democrats are becoming increasingly brazen in their attempts to commit voter fraud, the source said.
The Truth’s source speculated that the same operation is being rolled out in other places, perhaps in every county in the country where not prohibited by state law.
Heads-up to readers: Are the Democrats attempting this in your area? If the Democratic Party has mounted a nationwide operation, The Truth wants to know – [email protected]
More Evidence of Democrat Voter Fraud in Nursing Homes
The Democrats have a long history of voter fraud in nursing homes. In addition to the two incidents described above, The Truth cited three cases in its first story on the subject two weeks ago. Also, in 1998, a Democratic supervisor in Fayette County, Pa., Sean Cavanagh, reported that nursing home administrators frequently forge voter registrations and ballots in the names of their residents. Cavanagh was on the advisory board of a voter integrity project at the time. ) [“Eroding Elections”, Wall Street Journal, 3 Nov 1998: A22.]
The Truth’s source for the ‘Voting Day’ story above has personally witnessed suspicious circumstances pointing to voter fraud in nursing homes. Working with absentee ballots as an election officer, the source went to a nursing home to check on a number of ballots that had been received on one particular day. Election officers look to see if all the necessary information is provided on the ballot – name, address, date, signature, and witness signature. Noticing that several had come in that day with the same address and shaky or off-kilter handwriting indicating an aged person, the source determined the address to be a nursing home (it could have been an apartment building). Most bore the same witness signature, later determined to be a nursing home employee. On visiting the home, the source found many of the people supposedly casting absentee ballots were in fact demented or had diminished mental capacity. Some could not even tell that the source was in the same room with them. But these people supposedly voted a ballot and signed their name just a few days before. In Virginia, signed assistance forms must be sent in with the ballot if someone helped the voter with the process (Virginia Code 24.2-649 and 24.2-701). There were no assistance forms accompanying the ballots in question, the source said. One person was not at the home; she was in an ICU and had been there for two weeks, the source learned. Yet someone had apparently cast that person’s vote without their knowledge, the source said. The source has heard similar stories from other election officers in Virginia.
The Truth sent the assertions above to the communications director of the Democratic Party of Virginia for comment. There was no response by press time. The assertions stand unrebutted despite ample opportunity to dispute them, thus constituting constructive admissions of voter fraud on the part of Democrats.
Week 4
More Data Points
Stealing Elections One Dementia Patient at a Time
Some will dismiss the following stories as ‘just anecdotes’ but they are more properly viewed as additional data points, i.e., more tall mountains for the Democratic Party to jump over before it can claim it has rebutted the extensive case of nursing home voter fraud built against it in The Truth over the last four weeks.
The source of the ‘ice cream social’ story reported in The Truth earlier this month provided more detail about her mother’s case:
- … she was in Sunrise Assisted Living and they allowed "Organizing for America" to come in to register the residents. I did talk to the facility about my concern because my mother had dementia and was several years into the disease - (the theft by the Jamaican internet gangs happened in 2008, so by 2012 she was even further impaired and in fact within 6 months moved from the Assisted Living to a memory care unit) and letting them know that this was the group formerly known as "Obama for America" and they were not neutral. I also voiced my concern of the previous reports of Democrat groups like this taking advantage of impaired seniors and potential voter fraud. They said "no worries our staff will be right there." It was done on a Saturday and I arrived not long after they set up their table and sure enough my mother had already been to the table. She was a member of a Republican Women's Club with me, had worked as an election officer for years until she was about 75, and was always interested in politics, so anything political drew her attention immediately.
- I also followed up with a letter to the Sunrise Assisted Living corporate offices and I believe they said that they would not be allowing these groups there again. However, since we soon after moved my mother to a higher level of care at a different facility, and she has since passed away, I can't attest as to whether or not that ban has actually happened.
- While serving on the board, the source noticed that batches of 15-30 absentee ballots would come in from the same nursing home at the same time, all voted the same way – Democrat. This happened in every election. In one instance, the board determined it was a social worker at a nursing home who was the culpable party. The board instructed the president of the facility to prevent the social worker from doing this again and the activity stopped.
- When the source was a nursing home administrator, the source would not let staff fill out absentee ballots. Family members had to do it.
- The source saw a resident being helped who could not talk or respond to questions, yet the helper was filling everything out.
- Another resident being ‘helped’ was half-asleep in a wheelchair, not alert.
- The source had a relative who was approached, but the relative refused because he did not speak English. According to the source, this suggests that fraudsters target non-English speakers who have no idea they are voting.
- A woman at the source’s church asked the source for help in figuring out how to vote absentee. After the ballot arrived, the woman was stopped in the hallway of the church by a building custodian who asked the woman who she was voting for. When the woman – who was not well-educated and was easily intimidated - replied she was voting Republican, the building custodian snatched the ballot out of her hand and told her she was supposed to vote Democrat. The Truth’s source later took the woman and a dozen others to the absentee polling office where they could vote without being harassed by Democrats.
‘What Can I Do?’
- Protect your loved ones – If they can no longer make their own decisions, have them declared incompetent and taken off the voter rolls. If they are competent and want to vote, secure the ballot yourself. (Also, if you feel that someone is coercing your relative’s vote, contact your county board of election commissioners, county clerk or prosecuting attorney. ARKANSAS VOTER FRAUD PREVENTION HANDBOOK)
- Urge your local election board to administer absentee voting in every nursing home and senior care facility in your area. This is required in some states (e.g., Maryland, Florida, and Illinois). If the board is unwilling, the board should write a letter to facility administrators advising them that voting someone else’s ballot is a crime. Nursing home staff and outside groups could be held responsible.
- Contact the Republicans and other political parties to insist they take more of an interest in voter fraud and to be present when outside groups are invited into nursing homes for voter registration and absentee balloting.
- Seek legislation to
- require local election boards to administer all voting in nursing homes, with representatives of both major political parties present.
- “After a series of absentee-ballot frauds involving elderly voters in Florida -- including a scandal in the 1997 Miami mayoral race that led a judge to throw out 4,500 ballots and overturn the election -- the state tightened its fraud controls. It is now illegal for one person to sign as a witness on more than five absentee ballots, unless the person is acting in an official state capacity. The law also provides for representatives of the secretary of state to supervise votes in nursing homes to ensure that no one is coerced, and to prevent obviously mentally incompetent people from voting”. “Broken Ballot”, Wall Street Journal, 19 Dec 2000: A.1.
- “Chicago sends in election judges and poll watchers who are specially trained to observe voting in nursing homes.” “Voting and Nursing Home Residents: A Survey of Practices and Policies”, Joan L. O'Sullivan, Journal of Health Care Law and Policy (Vol. 4, Iss. 2 - 2002)
- tighten up absentee balloting procedures generally. Under current Virginia law, no photo ID is required for absentee voting (unlike in-person voting in the state).
- require local election boards to administer all voting in nursing homes, with representatives of both major political parties present.
The Truth’s coverage of nursing home voter fraud this month featured original investigative reporting, interviews, and a spectacular refusal by the Democratic Party of Virginia to comment on preparations for widespread nursing home voter fraud in Virginia. Wrapping up our coverage:
- Last week’s story on the Democratic Party’s preparations for nursing home voter fraud in one area of Virginia was reprinted at Bear Witness Central.
- The Democratic Party of Virginia still has not responded to the allegations of blanket voter fraud preparation in one area of Virginia reported last week in The Truth, despite The Truth’s requests for comment.
Updates
- 5/31/17 The Importance of Nursing Home Voting
by Reagan George, Virginia Voters Alliance