A Florida man has been arrested on charges of voter fraud after he allegedly forged signatures on petitions to make “No Labels” an officially recognized party in Kansas.
George Andrews, 30, was taken into custody in Dade City, Florida, according to a Feb. 19 press release from Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach’s office.
“The arrested individual was part of a scheme to defraud Kansas voters by placing their forged signatures on petitions,” Mr. Kobach, a Republican, said in a statement. “In Kansas, we take election fraud seriously, and we will prosecute every case where the evidence indicates a crime has been committed beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The arrest of Mr. Andrews follows what the Kansas attorney general described as an extensive investigation, leading to charges of two counts of election perjury and 28 counts of election forgery. Mr. Andrews will make an appearance in a district court in Johnson County as he awaits extradition to Kansas.
“No Labels” was founded in 2009 as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit dedicated to promoting centrist candidates, especially ones that aligned with the group’s focus on bipartisanship and “common sense.”
The group seems intent on establishing itself as a political party to present an alternative to President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.
In 2015, the Kansas state legislature gave the Attorney General’s Office and the Secretary of State’s Office the authority to prosecute election crimes, a power that Mr. Kobach has drawn on repeatedly to advocate for election integrity.
Cracking Down On Voter Fraud
When Mr. Kobach served as secretary of state from 2011 to 2019, he successfully prosecuted 12 cases of election fraud, including double voting and non-citizen voting.
He has taken aim at laws that he sees as lax on election security and backed legislation that would limit drop boxes to one per county, while also requiring that drop boxes be monitored continuously by two individuals from different political parties.
Mr. Kobach has argued that drop boxes provide an opportunity to circumvent anti-ballot harvesting statutes. This occurs when a ballot harvester obtains a voter’s permission to deliver their ballot and falsely identifies themselves on the ballot envelope with a different name. Consequently, when the signed envelope is dropped into the drop box, officials are unable to detect whether that individual has delivered an excessive number of ballots.
“There are still other layers of protection, but it makes our anti-harvesting statute pretty, pretty weak when drop boxes can be used to circumvent it,” Mr. Kobach told The Associated Press in October 2022.
Mr. Kobach also served as vice chairman of a voter fraud commission established by President Trump to investigate irregularities in the 2016 election. He was also involved in a Texas lawsuit that asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the 2020 presidential election on behalf of the former president.
He told The Associated Press in October 2022 that there’s “no question” there was voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and that, due to obstacles in auditing elections, Americans may never know “how many fraudulent ballots were cast.”
President Trump, who maintains that he was cheated out of victory in the 2020 election, said during a town hall in South Carolina this week that mail-in voting systems automatically lead to fraud.
He sought to draw a contrast between the greater security of in-person ballots and those sent by mail.
“When you go into a voting place, like you go into one in a properly run state, they look at you, you give voter ID, you give all sorts of identification,” President Trump said. “It would be very hard to cheat on a mass scale.”
Mail-In Ballot Fraud in 2020
A recent study examining the likely impact that fraudulent mail-in ballots had in the 2020 election found that the outcome would “almost certainly” have been different without the massive expansion of voting by mail.
The study was based on data obtained from a Heartland/Rasmussen survey conducted in December, which revealed that roughly one in five mail-in voters, or 20 percent, admitted to actions that could be potentially fraudulent in the presidential election.
After the researchers carried out additional analyses of the raw data, they concluded that there was a higher percentage of fraudulent mail-in ballots. They now believe that 28.2 percent of people who voted by mail in 2020 committed at least one type of behavior that is, “under most circumstances, illegal,” and so potentially amounts to voter fraud.
A Heartland Institute research editor and research fellow who was involved in the study explained to The Epoch Times that there are narrow exceptions where a surveyed behavior may be legal, like filling out a mail-in ballot on behalf of another voter if that person is blind, illiterate, or disabled, and needs assistance.
However, research fellow Jack McPherrin said such cases were within the margin of error and not statistically significant.
The new study found that, absent the huge expansion of mail-in ballots during the pandemic, President Trump would most likely have won.
Over 43 percent of 2020 votes were cast by mail, the highest percentage in U.S. history.
From The Epoch Times
