project veritas has another hit piece alleging massive, large scale voter fraud in minneapolis

per usual: these are bad actors who are purposefully deceptive in their work, and should be taken with a HUUUUUUGE truckload of salt.

Largely the claim seems to be centered around a video posted in July of a Somali man with what appears to be about 50 absentee ballots in his car (in the white mailing envelopes, not just the secrecy envelope). Some are sealed; some are not.

I don't trust Project Veritas' Somali translations (call me crazy, but they don't seem like the type of people willing to invest in accurate translations). They claim, based solely on this video, that this man was illegally delivering ballots and committing voter fraud.

They speak to Omar Jamal, who is a "spokesperson" for the Somali community who, as far as I can tell, is generally hated by a lot of the Somali community, largely for his 2009 assertion that the Somali community here is full of Al Qaeda sleeper cells.

(Someone with deeper knowledge can absolutely address this and correct me if I'm wrong about Jamal's position within the community. It also appears that he does not like Ilhan.)

So Jamal makes the claim that this is Ilhan Omar's campaign that is doing this, and Veritas runs with it, supplementing it with anonymous interviews from alleged "political workers." The evidence for ANY connection to Ilhan is ... very thin. As in, transperant.

They splice a lot of claims about how Ilhan's canvassers will help people apply for absentee ballots and follow up with voters to make sure they've filled them out (which is totally normal and legal campaign procedure) and an anonymous tipster saying they pay cash for votes.

So that whole part of it is bunk. The most "damning" piece of evidence appears to be the snapchat video from Liban Mohamed, displaying ballots in his car. There's an important part missing: there's no evidence he turned in those ballots or was actually doing anything with them.

For all we know, he was taking them to the post office, which is not illegal - you do not necessarily have to be the one who puts your own ballot in the mail. It would've been impossible for him to take all of them to the election office and have them accepted.

It's a fine distinction, but an important one. One person can act as an agent for up to three people to drop their ballot off. Veritas claims Mohamed as acting as an illegal agent of delivery, but on July 1, that wouldn't be possible, per Minnesota law: https://www.sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/other-ways-to-vote/have-an-agent-pick-up-your-ballot-agent-delivery/

So, while the video is kinda stupid, it is not a nefarious conspiracy. It's one video, cut and spliced by the Project Veritas team, and "supported" by testimony from unnamed sources and one guy who makes wild allegations about a thing he would have no reason to know about.