A woman from East Liverpool, Ohio, is spending some quality time in the Columbiana County Jail and will be there for the next six months after she was convicted of voter fraud. The woman, Rebecca A. Hammonds, was a paid canvasser for a liberal activist group called Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC) where she was paid to register voters in 2015.
Unfortunately for both Hammonds and Ohio, she went in a direction that anyone with half a brain would know was wrong.
In October of that year, the county elections board director contacted the sheriff’s office after his staff began finding discrepancies in voter registration applications filed by OOC, including five submitted in the name of dead people.
The sheriff’s office conducted the initial probe before turning the investigation over to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, a division of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, which handled the prosecution. The felony charges carried a maximum possible one-year prison sentence on each count. Brian Deckert, an associate assistant attorney general, had recommended a one-year prison sentence for Hammonds but he did not oppose her request for probation.
At Monday’s sentencing hearing, Deckert said Hammonds was paid an hourly rate and not per voter registration, so it was not “a situation where she had a quota system … I think it just may have come down to human laziness,” he said of Hammonds’ actions.
Public defender Jennifer Gorby attributed her client’s actions to “a lack of judgment on her part” and that she engaged in this behavior to keep her job.
Hammonds claims that she believes that no one at OOC was aware of her activities.
It’s worth mentioning that there is another reason besides laziness that could be a factor. For example, Hammonds may have intended for someone to actually use those registrations to cast fraudulent votes in an attempt to sway elections. The phrase “vote early, vote often” doesn’t just apply in Chicago, you know.
While it’s good that Hammonds was caught and is being punished, it’s a shame that she’s only getting six months in jail.
What she did undermines the validity of the system that forms the foundation of our system of government. Frankly, she deserves something far harsher than that. After all, with such a paltry punishment, what’s to stop the next person from trying to swing the vote their way by registering the deceased?
It’s funny how these cases almost always revolve around liberals, though, isn’t it?
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