Blue Red State Graft Watch- Democrat Officials in Arkansas, Mississippi in Trouble Over Ballot Fraud

An Arkansas state representative along with three others have pleaded guilty to federal charges of Consipracy to commit voter fraud last week.

Democrat State Representative Hudson Hollum, his father Kent Hollum, W. Memphis city councilman Phillip Wayne Carter and W. Memphis police officer Sam Malone admitted to securing absentee ballots from voters in exchange for food, liquor, cigarettes or cash as well as destroying absentee ballots in unsealed envelopes where Hollum's opponent was chosen

West Memphis City Councilman Phillip Carter, West Memphis Police Officer Sam Malone, Hudson Hallum, and his father Kent Hallum all pleaded guilty in a conspiracy to bribe voters to influence absentee votes in the District 54 primary election runoff in 2011. Hudson Hallum beat his opponent by just 8 votes. Many came from absentee ballots, reviewed by Hallum before they were mailed to election headquarters.

“The runners of this organization, the Malones and the Carters if you will, would accumulate the absentee ballots and give them to Kent or Hudson Hallum for basically their review," said the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, Jane Duke. “They wanted to make sure if the absentee ballots had been in fact cast for Hudson Hallum. If it had not been, in most circumstances if not all, the ballots were destroyed and were not mailed on to the clerk's office for count."

"I warned him,” said the police officer’s former friend and an attorney in Crittenden County, Hubert Bass. “He (Malone) would brag to me about how he was handling the absentee ballots, that he would go to people's mailboxes and get them out and I told him, Malone you can't do that, you're going to get in trouble.”

Hallum resigned as state representative for the 54th district on September 5th as the indictments were handed down. Arkansas's 54th district covers West Memphis as well as the towns of Marion, Earle, Turrell and other rural areas of Crittenden county.

Across the river and to the south, an NAACP official in Tunica county, Mississippi was sentenced in July on 10 counts of fradulently casting ballots in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

[...] a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.

Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times

Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.

In the trial, forensic scientist Bo Scales testified that Sowers’s DNA was found on the inner seals of five envelopes containing absentee ballots.

The Democrat Party has sought to minimize and ridicule allegations of ballot fraud- or even deny that it exists- in the face of voter ID laws being passed in a number of states.