(Headline USA) Indiana officials are investigating multiple cases of voter fraud after a county clerk’s office discovered what appear to be hundreds of fraudulent signatures and addresses on petition papers last month, according to The Federalist.
The Indiana State Police said this week they had launched an investigation after St. Joseph County Clerk Amy Rolfes alerted them to the discrepancies, which she said pointed to a potential petition forgery plot.
The forgeries reportedly came from a volunteer for Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips’s campaign. On Jan. 25, the volunteer attempted to turn in approximately 80 petition documents to help get Phillips on the state’s ballot. But the petitions were rejected because they lacked key information.
The next day, the volunteer returned with 53 completed pages. However, the information he added could not be verified, according to Rolfes. She said her staff attempted to compare the signatures on the petitions to the one’s in Indiana’s statewide database but could not find matches.
The addresses he provided also “simply did not exist,” she said. “The streets did, but not the house numbers … We would look through and compare the signatures, but there was nothing like them in the statewide system.”
The documents’ discrepancies became “glaringly apparent,” Rolfes said, noting they even included fake zip codes.
“We kept saying, ‘That’s not valid. That’s not valid,'” she said.
“They thought, ‘They’re never going to look.’ That had to be the mindset. It’s like cheating on homework,” Rolfes continued. “What I know is we were doing our jobs. … I feel that’s the first line of defense in election integrity: Do your job. If more people did, maybe we would see more of this stuff coming to light.”
Indiana State Police Sergeant Ted Bohner said he could not comment on a pending investigation but noted it “is probably going to be lengthy.”
