James O’Keefe walked into Minneapolis polling places in August to prove that anyone could show up and pretend to be a voter. On Wednesday, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged him and fellow influencer Cam Higby with one felony count each of unlawful voting and identity theft, for showing up and pretending to be voters.
So the experiment worked. It just caught the people running it.
Prosecutors say the Project Veritas founder and Higby visited four Hennepin County precincts during the August 11 primary and gave election judges the names of real registered voters, living and dead, without those people’s knowledge. Dressed in what O’Keefe called “Muslim garb,” they asked about vouching on hidden camera and posted the footage as proof of what they called the “sheer lunacy” of Minnesota’s vouching system.
The Part the Video Left Out
The defense is already public. “I never voted, I never signed an affidavit, and I never violated a law,” Higby said Wednesday. O’Keefe had not commented by Wednesday afternoon. Moriarty agrees nobody cast a ballot. Her case is that they started applying for one.
We read the two statutes the case turns on. Here is what they say:
- Vouching is narrow. Under section 201.061, a voter registered in the precinct can vouch for up to eight people, but only by signing an oath, in front of an election judge, that they personally know the person lives there.
- The oath is the safeguard. Signing it falsely is perjury, a felony. Both men skipped that step, and Moriarty says their videos never showed it.
- The crime does not need a ballot. Section 204C.14 makes it a felony to intentionally “misrepresent the individual’s identity in applying for a ballot.” Handing a judge a stranger’s name is the first move of that application.
- A signature would have been the easy proof. The same statute makes a roster signature “prima facie evidence” of intent to vote. Without one, prosecutors must prove intent from conduct, which puts the whole case on a single word: applying.
We think the charge is right, and the stunt explains why. The videos sold vouching as an open door. The statute describes a door with a sworn signature on it, and the only people on record walking up to it with borrowed names are the ones who were holding the camera.
If you set out to prove that strangers impersonate Minnesota voters, and the only strangers charged with impersonating Minnesota voters are you, the study has a sample problem.
The real numbers were never on O’Keefe’s side. The Secretary of State’s office says vouching covered about 0.6% of votes in the 2024 general election, mostly people updating an address, and every vouched registration is checked against a state database afterward.
None of this is new territory for O’Keefe. In 2010 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office under false pretenses and drew three years of probation. Moriarty’s own guess is the same kind of outcome this time: “presumptive probation under the sentencing guidelines.”
Both men are due in court on November 16. That is thirteen days after the midterms, which means the videos get to circulate as proof of fraud through Election Day, and the case against the two men in them gets heard once the votes are counted.