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Mail Man Charged With Attempted Election Fraud, Changed Mail-In Ballots That Were Given Out Due To Pandemic, Feds Say

   DailyWire.com
Mail in ballot
LESLEY MARTIN/AFP via Getty Images

Federal law enforcement officials announced on Tuesday that they charged Thomas Cooper, a mail carrier in West Virginia, for alleged attempted election fraud.

“Cooper, age 47, of Dry Fork, West Virginia, is charged with ‘Attempt to Defraud the Residents of West Virginia of a Fair Election.’ According to the affidavit filed with the complaint, Cooper held a U.S. Postal Service contract to deliver mail in Pendleton County,” The Department of Justice said in a statement. “In April 2020, the Clerk of Pendleton County received ‘2020 Primary Election COVID-19 Mail-In Absentee Request’ forms from eight voters on which the voter’s party-ballot request appeared to have been altered.”

Some of the ballots were reportedly changed from Democrat to Republican while other ballots were altered in other ways.

The investigation was conducted by the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office, the West Virginia Election Fraud Task Force, the FBI, and prosecutors from multiple U.S. Attorney’s offices in West Virginia.

The news comes as Twitter started attaching warning labels to President Donald Trump’s tweets on Tuesday that led to a series of articles from left-wing media organizations that claimed that Trump’s warnings about fraud coming from mail-in voting were “unsubstantiated.”

The notion that voter fraud does not exist is categorically false as thousands have been charged and convicted for voter fraud, including with respect to using mail in ballots to vote.

Last week, an election official in Philadelphia pled guilty to stuffing ballot boxes with fraudulent ballots for Democrat candidates, with the total number of fraudulent ballots being cast comprising a significant portion of the total votes that were cast.

“During his guilty plea hearing, [Domenick J.] DeMuro admitted that an unnamed political consultant gave DeMuro directions and paid him money to illegally add votes for certain Democratic candidates,” the Department of Justice said in a statement. “These candidates were individuals running for judicial office whose campaigns had hired the consultant, as well as other candidates for various federal, state, and local elective offices who were preferred by this consultant for a variety of reasons.”

“After receiving payments ranging from between $300 and $5,000 per election from the consultant, DeMuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machines, also known as ringing up votes, for the consultant’s clients and preferred candidates thereby diluting and distorting the ballots that were cast by actual voters,” United States Attorney William M. McSwain said at a press conference. “DeMuro would add these fraudulent votes to the totals during election day and then he would later falsely certify that the voting machine results were accurate. He would add the fraudulent votes by literally standing in the voting booth and voting over and over and over again as fast as he could when he thought that the coast was clear.”

“In May 2014, DeMuro stuffed the ballot box with 27 fraudulent ballots during the primary election. In May 2015, he padded the ballot box with 40 fraudulent votes. In 2016, it was 46 fraudulent votes,” McSwain said. “Now these numbers may sound relatively small, but they made up a significant percentage of the total votes that were cast at the polling place. In 2014, 118 total ballots were reported in the 36th Division of the 39th Ward. That means that DeMuro’s fraudulent votes accounted for over 22% of the total voting in that division in 2014. In 2015, his fraud accounted for over 15% of the total votes in the division. In 2016, his fraud accounted for over 17% of the votes.”

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