Three in Florida, Virginia charged with
voter fraud
Send a link to a friend
[October 29, 2016]
By Scott Malone
(Reuters) - Officials in Florida and
Virginia filed voter fraud charges against three people in apparently
unrelated cases on Friday, just 11 days before American voters cast
ballots in the hotly contested presidential race.
The charges targeted a Florida woman and a Virginia man accused of
filing bogus voter registration forms and a Florida woman alleged to
have tampered with absentee ballots she was opening at the Miami-Dade
Elections Department.
In the Iowa capital of Des Moines, county election officials referred
three cases of suspected voter fraud to police earlier this week,
leading to one arrest on Thursday, police said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has charged in recent
weeks that the election will be rigged in favor of Democrat Hillary
Clinton, though he has shown no proof for these claims and many
Republicans have called them unfounded.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle in Florida said
that 74-year-old Gladys Coego had been working as an absentee ballot
opener when a supervisor allegedly saw her changing ballots that had
been left blank to support a mayoral candidate. Prosecutors said that
Coego admitted to marking the ballots and was charged with two felony
counts of marking or designating the ballot of another.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Oct/29/images/ads/current/cca_laptop-sda021709.png)
"The integrity of the electoral process is intact because our procedures
work," said Christina White, the county's election supervisor, in a
statement.
Tomika Curgil, 33, was charged with five felony counts of submitting
false voter registration information for allegedly handing in forms
filled out by fictitious voters while working on a voter-registration
drive for a medical marijuana advocacy group.
A Virginia man was also charged with submitting falsified forms while
working for a voter-registration campaign, state prosecutors said.
Vafalay Massaquoi, 30, was arraigned on two felony counts of forging a
public record and two counts of voter registration fraud.
"There is no allegation that any illegal vote was actually cast in this
case," said Virginia Commonwealth's Attorney Bryan Porter. "Furthermore,
since the fraudulent applications involved fictitious people, had the
fraud not been uncovered, the risk of actual fraudulent votes being cast
was low."
[to top of second column] |
![](../images/102916pics/news_e9.jpg)
An election volunteer holds a box outside Trump Tower in the
Manhattan borough of New York City, October 26, 2016. REUTERS/Mike
Segar
![](../images/ads/current/richardson_lda_090916.png)
Neither Coego, Curgil nor Massaquoi could be reached for immediate
comment.
Police in Des Moines on Thursday arrested a woman who was accused of
voting twice - casting early-voting ballots at two locations - in
one of three cases of suspected voter fraud reported by the Polk
County Auditor's Office.
Police did not disclose the political affiliation of the woman,
identified as Terri Lynn Rote, 55, but the Des Moines Register
newspaper reported she was a registered Republican.
A man in Texas, where early voting started on Monday, was arrested
on Monday on charges of electioneering and loitering near a polling
place, public records show.
The man, Brett Mauthe, had been charged for showing up to vote in a
Trump hat and T-shirt with the phrase "basket of deplorables," a
reference to a comment Clinton made disparaging her rivals'
supporters, election officials told media.
(Additional reporting by Jonathan Herskovitz in Austin, Texas, and
Letitia Stein in Tampa, Florida; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Nick
Macfie)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2016 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Oct/29/images/ads/current/sonnys_lda_102416.png)
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2016/Aug/26/images/ads/current/ldn_medical_directory_small_2016.png) |