Indiana Dem official sentenced to prison for ’08 ballot fraud in Obama-Clinton primary
As Hillary Clinton prepares for a possible presidential run in 2016, it appears that she could have knocked then-candidate Barack Obama off the 2008 primary ballot in Indiana.
If anyone, including her campaign, had challenged the names and signatures on the presidential petitions that put Obama on the ballot, election fraud would have been detected during the race.
But at the time, no one did.
On Monday, there was some closure to the case, though, as the four defendants who were convicted or pleaded guilty in the state’s presidential petition fraud scandal were sentenced. Only one received prison time for the illegal scheme that touched the race for the White House.
“If there is a victim here, it is probably the Democratic Party,” said St. Joseph Superior Court Judge John Marnocha. “The defendants who were saying, ‘I was just following orders,’ or ‘I was just doing my duty,’ that’s no excuse. Through history a lot of evil has been done by those saying they were just following orders.”
The plot successfully faked names and signatures on both the Obama and Clinton presidential petitions that were used to place the candidates on the ballot. So many names were forged — an estimated 200 or more — that prosecutor Stanley Levco said that had the fraud been caught during the primary, “the worst that would have happened, is maybe Barack Obama wouldn’t have been on the ballot for the primary.”
“I think that Obama would still have been elected president, no matter what,” he said.
In court, former longtime St. Joseph County Democratic Chairman Butch Morgan, Jr. was sentenced to one year behind bars, and is expected to serve half that, as well as Community Corrections and probation. Former St. Joseph County Board of Elections worker and Democratic volunteer Dustin Blythe received a sentence of one year in Community Corrections and probation, which means no jail time.
In April, a jury convicted Morgan and Blythe on numerous felony conspiracy counts to commit petition fraud and felony forgery counts.
Who thinks that Indiana was the only state where election fraud was going on in 2008?