Political & Elections

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Video footage provided exclusively to The Daily Caller shows election workers in New Hampshire giving out ballots in the names of dead voters at multiple voting precincts during the state’s primary election on Tuesday.

The bombshell video is the work of conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas.

Voters in the Granite State are not required to present identification to vote. O’Keefe’s investigators were able to obtain ballots under the names of dead voters at polling locations Tuesday by simply asking for them, he said.

“Live free or die,” an election worker told one of the investigators in the video. “This is New Hampshire. No ID needed.”

WATCH:

In an interview with TheDC on Wednesday, O’Keefe said the exposé shows how voter fraud can be easier to perpetrate when identification isn’t required.

“There is fraud going on and our goal is to visualize it for people,” he said. (RELATED: Complete election coverage on The Daily Caller)

O’Keefe said he eventually plans to post full, unedited videos of the encounters. “It shows the integrity of the elections process is severely comprised,” the filmmaker said.

He said no laws were broken during the investigation and that his team members never claimed to be the dead people whose ballots they were trying to obtain. Instead, they carefully worded the way they asked for ballots, phrasing it like: “Do you have Earnest Chavanelle?” and “Do you have Paul Soucy?”

“We decided to go in there without using any false pretenses,” he said. “There’s no misrepresentation in these videos if you watch them — we didn’t lie about who we were.”

The investigators never actually voted when they were given ballots. Sting artists who received ballots would leave the voting precincts after saying they left their identification in the car.

“We were very careful about that,” he said. (EXCLUSIVE NEWT GINGRICH OP-ED: Photo ID provisions important to securing elections)

The investigation worked this way: O’Keefe and his team obtained names of recently deceased New Hampshirites through published obituaries, and used publicly available voter roll information to find dead people still on the voting rolls.

With that information, O’Keefe’s investigators went to the polls on Tuesday and requested ballots in the names of the deceased.

“Some of them died a few months ago, some of them died a few weeks ago,” he said.

In many cases, ballots were handed over by the poll workers without any skepticism. In only one case did a poll worker realize that the investigator wasn’t the person the ballot was meant for — because the woman giving out the ballots knew the dead person in question.

That incident made it into the Boston Herald.

In one instance, the sting artist told a poll worker that he voluntarily wants to show his ID. But the female poll worker responds that “the state says we’re not allowed to ask for identification.”

O’Keefe said the investigation stemmed from discovering that “there are people who have voted who are dead.”

“We found many, many people who are both dead and registered to vote. … How is it that dead people are voting? Someone’s committing fraud.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/01/11/video-nh-poll-workers-shown-handing-out-ballots-in-dead-peoples-names/#ixzz1jCmnPVKT