19 charged with voting illegally in NC: $200 fine biggest punishment so far

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BY JOSH SHAFFER
FEBRUARY 06, 2019 04:06 PM,
UPDATED 5 HOURS 16 MINUTES AGO

... In a Raleigh courtroom Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle delayed Harris’ case after learning that her citizenship and right to vote might hinge on whether she was a legitimate child ...

In January, Boyle, the chief judge in the eastern district of North Carolina, ordered Hyo Suk George to pay a $100 fine. A Korean-born resident of Columbus County, George voted in several presidential elections after being urged to register at her church. Alspaugh, the public defender in the case, said George, who speaks and understands limited English, had no intention to vote illegally.

Boyle spared George a prison sentence and reserved his criticism for local election officials who allowed her to vote.

“So they see a green card and say, ‘That’s OK’ because they don’t know what they’re doing,” he said in January. “They ought to be a little smarter than that” ...

https://www.thestate.com/news/state/north-carolina/article225598370.html

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1. In NC, only some illegal voting interests US attorney

BY THE OBSERVER EDITORIAL BOARD
FEBRUARY 06, 2019 04:02 PM,
UPDATED 3 HOURS 43 MINUTES AGO

President Trump, in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, broadly and wrongly portrayed illegal immigrants as murderers, rapists and drug dealers who must be stopped. But Trump does not limit his anti-immigrant zeal to them. In service to Trump, authorities are now handcuffing and shackling noncitizens – including those here legally and those who thought they were following the law – for voting.

Robert Higdon Jr., the U.S. attorney for eastern North Carolina appointed by Trump, had 20 noncitizens rounded up and charged last August for improperly voting in the 2016 election, the Washington Post reported.

It was a feeble attempt to prove Trump’s claim of widespread illegal voting, and a shining example of misplaced priorities. After all, Higdon was chasing this handful of legal residents even as he ignored repeated claims of absentee ballot fraud in North Carolina’s 9th District – fraud that actually may have swayed an election.

Higdon’s targets, the Post said, included people like Jose Solano-Rodriguez, who never sought to register to vote but who voted after receiving a card from the Wake County Board of Elections saying he was registered. It also included Alessandro Cannizzaro, an Italian who has lived in the Raleigh area legally since 2000. He applied for citizenship in 2003, passed the test, but did not take the oath because he was told the room was too full, the Post reported ...

https://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/editorials/article225619840.html

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2. U.S. Attorney Warned About Ballot Tampering, Targeted Immigrants Instead

by Colin Kalmbacher | 3:05 pm, February 4th, 2019

One of President Donald Trump‘s handpicked federal prosecutors in North Carolina appears to have ignored multiple and repeated warnings from state officials that Republican campaign operatives were illegally manipulating absentee ballots in the contest for the Tarheel state’s 9th Congressional District. Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney Robert Higdon Jr. focused his office’s efforts on prosecuting legal residents who mistakenly thought they were allowed to vote ...

Jose Solano-Rodriguez was canvassed by campaign workers on various occasions and even told he could vote by election volunteers. They were wrong and he was one of the people arrested last August. But it gets a bit more complicated than that.

According to Solano-Rodriguez’s attorney, his client never personally filled out a voter registration application. Solano-Rodriguez, who runs a successful landscaping business, was at work while someone with a voter registration drive dropped by a party being held at his home. Somehow, an application was filled out in his name ...

During a court hearing last month, Alspaugh said that George presented her legal permanent residency card, her driver’s license and her Social Security card when she applied for her voter registration card. The official processing her application processed her application anyway ...

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-appointed-u-s-attorney-was-warned-about-gop-ballot-tampering-in-n-c-targeted-immigrants-instead/

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3. US Attorney Too Busy Nailing Immigrants To Notice Fraud

By Kate Riga
February 4, 2019 10:42 am

Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Robert Higdon Jr. was too preoccupied trying to snag immigrants for voting illegally to notice the election fraud scandal occurring right under his nose in North Carolina’s 9th District.

According to a Sunday Washington Post report, Higdon took his cue from the Trump administration and has both arrested people and requested information about foreign-born workers from state and local agencies—a task officials say will cost millions and be time consuming.

The five people sentenced under Higdon were given minimal penalties and misdemeanor convictions, as they almost all were encouraged by campaign workers to vote and didn’t lie about their statuses.

Higdon’s office reportedly showed much less interest in the bona fide election fraud happening in the same parts of North Carolina, where mail-in ballots were illegally collected and disregarded. Officials dismissed many warnings about the fishy circumstances of the vote count ...

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/north-carolina-attorney-too-busy-nailing-immigrants-for-illegal-voting-to-notice-9th-district-fraud

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4. NC county's elections board let woman vote illegally

By The Associated Press
Posted Jan 18, 2019 at 7:41 AM

WHITEVILLE — A federal judge has chastised election officials in North Carolina who let a Korean woman with a green card vote in three elections.

The News & Observer reports Hyo Suk George had lived legally in the country for nearly two decades before a town council member at church encouraged her to vote. She registered in Columbus County with a driver’s license, Social Security number — and a green card. George voted in 2008, 2010 and 2016.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle said the board of elections in Whiteville “ought to be a little smarter than” accepting a green card as proof of voter eligibility. Green card holders are not U.S. citizens.

George faced prison time for illegal voting, but Boyle let her go with a $100 fine ...

https://www.thetimesnews.com/news/20190118/nc-countys-elections-board-let-woman-vote-illegally

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5. ICE wants NC voter data. Is the state refusing to comply?

BY PAUL A. SPECHT
FEBRUARY 05, 2019 10:32 AM,
UPDATED FEBRUARY 05, 2019 12:40 PM

In between planning an election and investigating a congressional race, North Carolina’s elections board received a request from immigration officials for millions of documents.

The board in August received a subpoena from the office of Robert Higdon, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina. The subpoena was requested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, The News & Observer reported in September. Both agencies are under the direction of the Trump administration.

The subpoena of the state elections board asks for reams of materials acquired by the board between 2010 and August 2018. The request seeks standard voter registration application forms, federal post card applications, federal write-in-absentee ballots, absentee ballot request forms, provisional voting forms, one-stop (early voting) application forms, any “admission or denial of non-citizen return” forms, as well as any voter cancellation or revocation forms.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office also subpoenaed similar records from 44 county elections boards in the eastern part of the state ..

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article225419845.html