MANCHESTER, New Hampshire — Senior Judicial Watch attorney Robert Popper, a former Department of Justice election integrity official, told Breitbart News that he’s concerned about seemingly high percentages of same-day registration for voting in Tuesday’s elections in New Hampshire.
Popper is in New Hampshire watching polls on election day for Judicial Watch, a watchdog group.
Popper said in an interview on Tuesday afternoon that at polling places he and his team have been at throughout the Granite State on election day, anywhere from 6 to 9 percent of voters registered on site.
I wouldn’t call it irregularities. Here’s what we’re seeing: New Hampshire has these unusual ideals, they have two features. One is you technically need a photo ID to vote. However, in the event that you don’t have one, you can submit an affidavit and that will entitle you to vote. In the same vein, they have election-day registration–what the rest of the country calls ‘same day registration.’ It means the same thing, but in New Hampshire election day registration you have technically have to prove your identity, your citizenship and your domicile. With respect to all three of those factors, you can submit an affidavit in the event that you can’t submit documentary proof. Also, in both of those cases, both for in-person voting and same-day registration, you can submit an ID that the poll official finds acceptable–whatever that might be. What we’re concerned about is that it is a toothless protection and in fact same-day registration is inherently a difficult procedure to police because they don’t have time to check out the registration of the person who registers. You may catch it later, you may not. In the event there’s something wrong with the registration like mistakes or up to and including fraud–or just a simple error–but it’s the kind of procedure that lends itself to mistakes and ultimately to fraud.
Popper said that since the state’s statutes “have these loopholes in them,” it’s something Judicial Watch–which sent him and a team of election integrity experts to New Hampshire–“is concerned about.”
“What we have seen today is anywhere from 6 to 9 percent of the places we’ve been at during the times we’ve been there–so I don’t know what the results will be at the end of the day, and I don’t know what the results will be in the picture as a whole but one day we will know–but from what we’ve seen anywhere from 6 to 9 percent of those who register are registering on election day,” Popper said. “A significant percentage of those, a small but consistent percentage of the smaller percentage, are using affidavits instead of documentary evidence.”
Old Dominion University professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest just published a study in the Washington Post before the election arguing that non-citizens admit they are registering and voting in American elections and may be deciding U.S. elections.
“Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races,” Richman and Earnest wrote for the Washington Post, previewing a study for the Electoral Studies journal citing data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
Popper said that in New Hampshire, if this Old Dominion University research is true, it’s likely that illegal immigrants are voting in the Granite State today.
“If you’ll let me explain, I’d say that it’s probably certain,” Popper said when asked if illegal aliens are likely registering and voting in New Hampshire on Tuesday. “What they identified was that in 2008 6.4 percent of non citizens that they spoke to had both registered and voted. Then it was 2.2 percent I believe in the last midterm elections in 2010 that that was so. If you take the non citizen population, both documented and undocumented, depending on who you believe that could be 22 million people or more. 6.4 percent or 2.2 percent of that is hundreds of thousands of votes nationwide.”
“If that report is at all true, if it is one half true, if it is one quarter true, it’s astonishing,” he continued. “It would mean that probably that there are such votes cast in most states. That would make that likely. And it’s one of the concerns we have when we’re monitoring for voter ID and when we’re monitoring for the use of proof when we’re allowing people to register to vote.”
Popper said when results are called later tonight–it’s still unclear whether incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) or former Sen. Scott Brown will win–people here can be confident.
“But they should be less confident than they could be if there was a seriously enforced regiment of voter ID, and there was a rigorously enforced system of demanding proof of residence and domicile,” Popper said. “The laws could be better. I don’t think I would announce a coup at this point, but the voting rules are not what they should be. There’s a certain element of common sense missing from them.”
Before joining Judicial Watch, Popper spent eight years in management at the Department of Justice. He left after the New Black Panther Party case in Philadelphia, which he personally oversaw, because he felt concerns about partisanship creeping in under the leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder.