If you’re not familiar with “ballot harvesting,” Fox News described it this past April as “the practice of allowing political operatives to collect voters’ ballots and turn them in en masse to polling stations.” But what happens when these “political operatives” allegedly target the elderly, either tell them how to vote on an absentee ballot or just take the ballot, have them sign it and fill the rest out themselves, or collect said ballot and tell the voter they will deliver their ballot for them?
Undercover journalism outlet Project Veritas released a video on Sunday that allegedly shows evidence as well as insider whistleblowers telling of rampant ballot harvesting happening in the Minneapolis, Minn. area done to seemingly help former Somali journalist and recently elected member of the Minneapolis City Council Jamal Osman and Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).
Osman is part of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
The Project Veritas video shows now-deleted footage of a man identified as Liban Mohamed bragging about all of the absentee ballots he collected that all allegedly were votes for Osman.
“All these here are absentee ballots,” Mohamed said, shuffling through a pile of alleged ballots on his car dashboard. “Can’t you see? Look at all these, my car is full. My car is full.”
That’s when Mohamed mentioned Osman by name.
“All of these are for Jamal Osman,” Mohamed continued. “Look, look. Just today we got 300 (ballots) for Jamal Osman.”
Omar Jamal, a man who’s working with the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office and is also the chairman of the Somali Watchdog Group, feels that more people should know about what’s happening with “ongoing election fraud.”
“Well, I want to be part of this investigation because of ongoing election fraud that we feel we should bring to the attention of everyone,” Jamal said. “Therefore, chances are, we can do something about it.”
An undercover reporter for Project Veritas asked a “ballot harvester” who the people are that are filling out these absentee ballots.
“The ones who work for the campaign (Ilhan Omar),” the man responded, “and they send them for us too.”
The man expanded on the process:
There are some Somali people who work with Ilhan (Omar). They come to us. They come to our apartments. They say, this year, you will vote for Ilhan. They say we will apply for the absentees’ ballots. We will fill the form for you, and when you get it back, we will again fill it out and send it. You stay home and you will not go to the place. When we get the mail back, they mark for us by saying ‘this is Ilhan.’ Then they sign it (ballot) for us, put it in an envelope and send it.
When we sign the voting document and they fill it out is when they give us the money.
As noted in the Project Veritas video, voting for others illegally — if caught — is “punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.”
For the full Project Veritas video, watch below: