Conservative Provocateur Creates Fake LGBT Group To ‘Expose’ Voter Fraud
James O’Keefe, perhaps best known as the undercover pimp who targeted the community organizing group ACORN, has once again been trying to target Democratic candidates with undercover schemes, this time in Colorado. Last week, he and two collaborators tried to bait field staffers working on the reelection campaign for Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) into approving voter fraud using Colorado’s new vote-by-mail system.
This year will be the first time Colorado voters have the opportunity to vote in a general election by mail. All registered voters will receive a ballot in the mail that they simply fill out and return. On several occasions, O’Keefe and his collaborators approached Udall campaign staffers to suggest that they fill out these ballots for other people.
In one case, a man visited a Democratic field office in Boulder hoping to volunteer for the campaign. Identifying himself with an LGBT activist student group called Rocky Mountain Vote Pride, the individual suggested that he could fill out mail-in ballots for other college students who had moved away but still received mail on campus. Though he was turned away, he came back another time, bringing along a friend he introduced as a “civics professor” from the University of Colorado-Boulder who also served as the faculty adviser for Rocky Mountain Vote Pride. Staffers later confirmed that the “professor” was, in fact, O’Keefe himself, matching his appearance to a photo O’Keefe tweeted of himself in disguise as a “45 yo” with a mustache.
Rocky Mountain Vote Pride does not seem to be a real group. It has a basic website and Facebook page, neither of which contains any contact information. The website suggests it’s a student group dedicated to advancing “voter participation and equality in America,” listing some basic polling on marriage equality, without citation.
O’Keefe’s Project Veritas would not confirm to Mother Jones any “operations in Colorado,” but spokesman Stephen Gordon said to “watch for our upcoming videos.”
Recently, O’Keefe tried to expose Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) as secretly supporting same-sex marriage — he’s one of the only Democrats in the Senate who doesn’t. In 2010, O’Keefe and his mentor applied for same-sex marriage licenses in Massachusetts, telling clerks they were straight and just wanted insurance coverage, seemingly just to prove that they could.
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This has been reposted from Think Progress.
