Fraud not found in big batch of ballots

The claim: “We indicted someone in Texas, 1,700 ballots collected from people who could vote, hemade themout and voted for the person he wanted to.” — U.S. Attorney General William Barr

Barr made the statement in an interview on CNN on Sept. 2, as he made the case that voting by mail is “fraught with the risk of fraud and coercion.”

PolitiFact ruling: False. Prosecutors investigated about 700 ballots — not 1,700 — for possible fraud in Dallas County in 2017. But investigators never found evidence of widespread fraud, and the ballots under scrutiny were cast in favor of the candidates the voters supported.

Discussion: The U.S. Justice Department already has walked back this claim, but social media posts continue to echo Barr’s inaccurate statement.

One, from Sept. 17, attributes to Barr a paraphrased statement of what he actually said: “‘We arrested oneman who filled out 1,700 ballots. That’s what happens with mail-in ballots.’ - AGBarr.”

The Justice Department did not indict someone in Texas for casting 1,700 ballots. A spokesperson for the department told the Washington Post that before the interview, Barr was “provided a memo prepared within the department that contained an inaccurate summary about the case, which he relied upon when using the case as an example.”

In 2017, prosecutors in Dallas County investigated suspected mail-in voter fraud after receiving a tip that voters who had not requested mail ballots received notices that they would receive them, according to the Post.

The name “Jose Rodriguez” appeared on about 700 ballots, indicating that this person helped fill them out. Andy Chatham, the assistant district attorney on the case at the time, said that when investigators approached the voters who were said to have cast the ballots, they generally said the ballots were legitimate and cast for the candidate they supported, the Post reported.

“We didn’t find any evidence of widespread voter fraud, and instead the ballots that were returned were consistent with the voter’s choice,” the paper quotes Chatham as saying.

One suspect was arrested in the case: Miguel Hernandez, who pleaded guilty to forging a woman’s signature on a mail-in ballot in a Dallas County municipal election, the Dallas Morning News reported. Elderly voters had alleged that someone forged their signatures on mail-in ballots.

“He violated the law, but not for voting,” Chatham told ABC News. “It was for procuring mailin ballots under false pretenses.”

Mike Snipes, another prosecutor, said investigators initially suspected that there were potentially 1,700 fraudulent ballots, “but we did not uncover that, at all,” the Post quotes him as saying. “We actually thought there was voter fraud initially, and we couldn’t find it except that little tiny case.”