A court in Ohio sentenced an environmental activist to six months in jail after pleading guilty to 13 felony counts of voter fraud.
Rebecca Hammonds faced 35 counts of falsely registering people to vote and forging signatures on voter registration forms.
Via the Salem News:
Hammonds was a paid canvasser for the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), a liberal activist group that was active in registering voters in the southern part of the county during September and October 2015, when the voter registration fraud occurred. 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.
In an ironic twist, Hammonds group once accused the local Board of Elections of engaging in voter fraud themselves.
“It’s our last great hope that our elections are fair, and it seems to have gone wrong on the local level,” a representative of the group said at the time. “Something has run amok.”
Indeed it has, but little did he know it would involve a member of his group.
The Judge in Hammonds case could have granted her probation, though he felt the charges were too serious to overlook.
“I just can’t overlook this,” Judge C. Anthony Pike said. “You attempted to violate the integrity of our election process in the county.”
He then ruled that Hammond “made a mockery of our system.”
“If 180 days (in the county jail) doesn’t teach you a lesson, nothing will.”
The sentence comes on the heels of an investigation by Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, who discovered hundreds of non-citizens were registered to vote in his state, while dozens of them did cast a ballot in 2016.
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