During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Attorney General Bill Barr got wrong key details of a Texas case that he claimed was evidence of widespread fraud in mail-in voting, ABC News reports.
Barr told Blitzer that the Department of Justice indicted a man in Texas who had collected and completed 1,700 blank mail-in ballots, pointing to the case as an example of ease with which someone can manipulate the election system.
The problem is, the story is virtually completely wrong. Let’s start with what’s accurate: there was a case in Texas.
But the DoJ didn’t prosecute any for voter fraud in this scenario. In fact, no one was convicted of voter fraud. The Dallas County prosecutor’s office prosecuted a man for unlawfully applying for ballots.
Twenty-eight-year-old Miguel Hernandez was convicted for forging a voter’s signature in a case where his employer, an unspecified political consultant, hired Hernandez to obtain mail-in ballots in 2017.
The scheme was discovered before the ballots were ever filled out or submitted. They were invalidated before they were ever in a ballot box. And the local prosecutor’s office found about 600 cases (not 1,700) but the US DoJ didn’t bring charges; the county prosecutor did.
So basically everything Barr said was wrong. Well, except Texas.