The latest exposé by Project Veritas has revealed voting operations in pockets of Minneapolis‘s Somali community that resemble the the warlord-led clans of their native country more than American democracy.
The corrupt and illegal ballot-harvesting operations not only elevated Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., into office but also helped secure spots for local city officials.
The video report led President Donald Trump on Monday to call for action.
This is totally illegal. Hope that the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota has this, and other of her many misdeeds, under serious review??? If not, why not??? We will win Minnesota because of her, and law enforcement. Saved Minneapolis & Iron O Range! https://t.co/yete31P680
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 28, 2020
Many of the alleged victims may not even be American citizens, according to whistleblower Omar Jamal, who works with Ramsey County Sheriff Department and is chairman of the Somali Watchdog Group.
Refugees of the war-torn African conflict zone are still obligated to undergo the naturalization process before becoming eligible to vote.
“We have to understand that the immigrants mostly, here now, are first generation immigrants,” Jamal said.
“Through no fault of their own the new immigrants are learning about democracy from the ballot harvesters,” he added. “When they get here, because of that ignorance, not knowing how this, all things work. Sometimes they even think it’s legal.”
As a result, many of the political operatives involved in defrauding senior citizens and other members of the Somali community do so brazenly without even trying to conceal their operations.
“It’s an open secret,” Jamal said. “she [Omar] will do anything that she can do to get elected, and she has hundreds of people on the streets doing that.”
One operative, Liban Mohamed, was caught on a July Snapchat video bragging about the number of blank absentee ballots he had collected and appearing to admit to a cash-for-vote scheme.
He claimed to be the brother of Jamal Osman, who won the city’s Ward 6 council seat in a special election on the same day as Omar’s primary.
Mohamed said he had collected 300 ballots for Osman by 7:30 am that morning.
“Money is everything. Money is the king in this world,” he boasted, weaving in and out of English and his native Somali language.
“If you got no money, you should not be here, period, you know what I am saying?” he continued. “Money is everything, and a campaign is managed by money.”
However, not all of the operations pay cash. Some collected ballots from senior-living centers where the residents simply had their ballots confiscated.
And other victims reported that the coercion included intimidation tactics.
“They fight you if you speak up,” said one Project Veritas insider.
Jamal warned that by shrugging off isolated incidents of systemic vote fraud, the operations risked becoming entrenched in the culture and spreading elsewhere.
“If American people don’t pay attention to what’s happening, the country will collapse,” he said.
“The regulations, if you ignore that and you let corruption and fraud become a daily business and then tough luck, the country will not exist as they [Americans] know it,” he added.
Already, he said, Minnesota’s statewide Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party seemed to have turned a blind eye to the operations, if not embraced them.
“I’m afraid it’s already too big to stop, you know, maybe it’s too late,” Jamal said.
“Maybe it’s already too big to stop,” he continued. “There’s a lot of people invested in this, you know, and they don’t care how they did it: ‘We win,’ and that’s it.”
Hennepin County Attorney Jeff Wojciechowski reassured Project Veritas that the operations revealed in the video were “illegal, and we will be investigating.”
