Photo: AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, File
The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office on Wednesday charged conservative journalist James O’Keefe and influencer Cam Higby over an undercover report on Minnesota’s polling places. According to NBC News, the two face felony charges of unlawful voting and identity theft after they allegedly misrepresented themselves while conducting the report.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, who announced the charges at a news conference, accused the pair of entering polling places during the state’s Aug. 11 primary and identifying themselves using the names of registered voters in those precincts without those voters’ knowledge or permission.
Moriarty said both men “stopped short of signing the oath” required before receiving a ballot, but argued that Minnesota law clearly states no one may intentionally misrepresent their identity when applying for a ballot.
O’Keefe and Higby were testing a Minnesota process known as vouching, which lets a registered voter in the same precinct vouch for up to eight people registering on Election Day, while staff at residential facilities can vouch for their residents. The pair disguised themselves and used hidden cameras to record their visits to multiple Minneapolis polling locations, then posted the videos on social media in August.
O’Keefe said in a post on X that they dressed in “Muslim garb,” including a full-face veil known as a niqab for one of them, and that their goal was to “expose the sheer lunacy of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system.” In his telling, the purpose was to find out whether the vouching system could be used to register and vote without identification.
Secretary of State Steve Simon pushed back, saying that, as he reads the law, “you can’t impersonate another registered voter, and that’s exactly what they appear to have filmed themselves doing.”
Neither O’Keefe nor Higby actually went through with voting, and one of the people they allegedly impersonated was able to vote later that same evening.
Under Minnesota’s vouching law, someone who registers on Election Day without the documents required to prove their current residence can have another registered voter in the same precinct vouch for them. The voucher must accompany the applicant to the polling place and sign an oath confirming the applicant lives at the stated address. One registered voter can vouch for up to eight people, but those who have been vouched for cannot vouch for anyone else.
