Voter fraud in New Jersey

As you know, I am pessimistic on today’s election; however, John Fund has more troublesome news,
Chris Christie’s Next Case: Who Stole My Election?
Absentee voter fraud may play a significant role in New Jersey’s gubernatorial election.

Plenty of reasons exist for suspecting absentee fraud may play a significant role in tomorrow’s Garden State contests. Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York appear to have moved into the state. An independent candidate for mayor in Camden has already leveled charges that voter fraud is occurring in his city. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is taking advantage of a new loosely written vote-by-mail law to pressure county clerks not to vigorously use signature checks to evaluate the authenticity of absentee ballots, the only verification procedure allowed.

The state has received a flood of 180,000 absentee ballot requests. On some 3,000 forms the signature doesn’t match the one on file with county clerks. Yet citing concerns that voters would be disenfranchised, Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey’s secretary of state asking her “to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.” Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks “may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis” and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots. Those ballots, of course, would then provide a pool of votes that would be subject to litigation in any recount, with the occupant of New Jersey’s highest office determined by Florida 2000-style scrutiny of ballot applications.

And then there are the messenger ballots,

Elsewhere, an investigation is being conducted into a report that people wearing Acorn T-shirts entered an East Orange hospital near Newark carrying blank absentee ballots and left with completed ballots. New Jersey law allows anyone to pick up an absentee ballot for someone else — these are called messenger ballots.

Not to be missed, the Service Employee International Union and New York’s Working Families Party are also here, ready for election day action.

Just another day in the endless swamp that is New Jersey politics.

h/t Instapundit.