In the Rio Grande Valley, for example, politiquerias roam colonias, preying on the most vulnerable voters and voting their ballots for them. In Cameron County, Texas, nine politiquerias were charged with voter fraud related to mail ballots. It is most often the poor and the elderly who lose their votes to the ballot harvesters.
It’s not just one county in Texas either. When we were at the Justice Department, we were involved in a case of systemic vote-by-mail fraud in Noxubee County, Mississippi. A federal court found that mail ballot fraud was very real, part of an organized scheme to disenfranchise voters.
It worked like this. The harvesters snatched mail ballots from the mailboxes of people they knew. They would then knock on their doors, ballots in hand, offering to “help” them vote. The harvesters would then fill in the ballots for their candidates, regardless of what the intended voters had told them.
The court ruling contains tragic testimony from one victim, Susan Wood. When asked why she allowed a harvester to fill out her ballot, Ms. Wood answered that the harvester “knows folks” better than she did — a classic case of trust betrayed.