government

The November 8 election in Lincoln went as smoothly as it usually does, though there was one complication beforehand — town officials had to deal with a formal complaint of suspected voter fraud lodged by Todd Pond Road resident Thomas Risser.

In his October 31 complaint, Risser alleged that there were 357 people who were “illegally or incorrectly registered to vote in Lincoln” and provided a list of names and addresses compiled by Stephen J. Stuart based on discrepancies between Lincoln’s voter list and the U.S. Postal Service’s National Change of Address (NCOA) database. (Stuart is president of Stuart Research LLC, a Deland, Fla., company that lists as subsidiaries Stuart Research LLC, a direct mail and marketing company with no apparent website, and NCOA-easy.com, which updates lists of mailing addresses for a fee for organizations that send out bulk mail.) 

Just days before the Election Day, Town Clerk Valerie Fox scrambled to quickly respond as required by law, consulting with town counsel Lauren Goldberg and convening a meeting of Lincoln’s Board of Registrars of Voters. The three-person board voted unanimously on November 3 to deny, on Goldberg’s advice, Risser’s request to act on his complaint, saying it failed to meet the standard required under state law.

Reached by phone on November 10, Goldberg said that similar complaints were filed by residents in every city and town in the Massachusetts 5th Congressional district — an effort spearheaded by the campaign of Republican Caroline Colarusso, who was challenging incumbent Democrat Rep. Katherine Clark for the seat. Clark won by a margin of 75% to 25%.

A mailing address “may or may not relate to residency — it is not in itself evidence of residency. It doesn’t support the allegation… that’s really not the way election law works,” Goldberg said.

“It does not demonstrate that anybody has moved to another town or state, let alone [that they have] registered to vote somewhere else. All [Risser’s] got is mail is being sent somewhere else,” said Registrar Laura Glynn.

“It’s hard enough to get people to vote. For somebody who wanted to vote twice, it would certainly be a pretty intentional criminal act,” said Registrar Marget Flint.

As Fox explained at the board meeting and Goldberg later confirmed, there is a system in place to make sure people don’t vote twice, vote from a location where they don’t reside, or are mistakenly denied the opportunity to vote. The town sends a census form to every voter by mail once a year to ensure they still live at their Lincoln address. If they don’t return the form or a follow-up postcard two years in a row, or if they don’t vote in two consecutive federal elections, they are designated as inactive on the town’s voter rolls.

If someone moves and does not re-register to vote in another town, they are eligible to vote at their former address’s location for six months. If they do re-register, the new city or town immediately alerts the former town to remove them from their records.

Slightly more than half the names on the list in Risser’s complaint were associated with addresses on Hanscom Air Force Base, where the population shifts frequently as military postings change. 

Providing just a long list of names of people who may or may not be incorrectly registered is also not legally appropriate, Goldberg said. “The data from the NCOA is really evidence of nothing and is not personal to the individual. You can’t complain about 10 people [collectively] or even five. To require someone to come in [for a hearing], there has to be information about an individual, not several hundred or thousand. They have to provide information that a reasonable person would say ‘Hey, there’s enough here that merits looking into something.’”

As a last resort, someone who believes an individual is voting illegally may challenge that person at the polls (or by correspondence if the person voted early or by mail). In that case, both the voter and challenger would have to sign sworn statements and the vote would still be counted, albeit provisionally.

“No one showed up at the polls and challenged any of those voters in any of those towns, and that speaks volumes,” Goldberg said.

“The allegation [Risser] is making is very serious under the election laws… it’s a big deal,” she continued. If a registrar decides that someone may in fact be illegally registered to vote in their town, they are required to have that person served a subpoena served by a sheriff or process server, and both the recipient and the complainant must appear at a hearing before the board with legal counsel, documentation and possibly witnesses, according to state law. “We are relying on the voter under the penalty of perjury. If they illegally vote, that is a crime.”

Fraud opportunities are rampant, Risser says

In a conversation with the Lincoln Squirrel on November 9, Risser said he was not aware that the Board of Registrars had rejected his complaint. The affidavit text “was written by an attorney, and I assumed they were competent in the law and would have met legal standards.”

Risser and his wife Edie (who he said was heavily involved in the regional effort to file voter roll complaints) organized the infamous “voter integrity” event in Bemis Hall last May. The main speaker was Seth Keshel, one of several ex-military men and election deniers who toured the country pushing baseless conspiracy claims.

What was Risser’s motivation in filing the complaint? “Nobody really looks at [voting procedures], and if they did, they would be aghast at the opportunities for fraud,” he said. “No one is doing their duty in terms of the registrars… the law of the land is being systematically violated.”

Asked if he thought any current or former Lincoln residents were being intentionally deceptive about their voting status, he acknowledged, “In our little town, it’s very unlikely because people know each other so well. I’m not worried about throwing off elections in Lincoln; I’m worried about larger cities where people don’t know each other.”

Risser — a U.S. Navy veteran and a cardiologist with the Cambridge Health Alliance — said his operating principle in this case was “think globally, act locally. If it can happen here where we’re supposed to be educated people with a citizenry concerned about government, it can happen anywhere. This is one tiny little step to get every town” to make sure its voting records are correct, he said. 

Asked if he thought the 2020 Presidential election results were valid, Risser said, “I don’t know and I don’t think anyone else knows.” The bigger problem is the vulnerability of voting machines, he claimed. Lincoln uses paper ballots that are electronically scanned. “I’m sure the scanner reads correctly — what it does with the data is another issue. It depends who programmed the bloody thing,: he said. “These machines are incredibly dangerous. You can reprogram so the results read 51 to 49 [percent] or whatever you want them to read. The Chinese know my childhood girlfriend’s first name. Everyone’s getting hacked everywhere. We’re vastly too trusting of a system that’s rather easy for cyber-smart people to overwhelm.”

Risser went on to condemn the supposed ability to vote without being a U.S. citizen (“I’d say we are the laughingstock of the world in that regard,” he said), being able to vote in some cases without being asked to show a legal ID, or people receiving a ballot in the mail without having requesting one. 

What about the dozens of lawsuits alleging voter fraud that were filed and dismissed after the 2020 election? “Most of those were thrown out based on the formality of standing” to sue, Risser said. However, “it’s true that nothing has been proven conclusively, and that’s gratifying.”

As for former President Donald Trump — the source of much of the current suspicion about voting — “I don’t trust Trump. I think he’s proven himself to be such a narcissist that I’d have to question his motives. He’s a terrible example for our children… the issue is providing a country that our children deserve. We’re not Republicans or Democrats, we’re Americans.

“Whether [Risser and others] intended to make election day difficult or make people worried about going to the polls, it did that. Just the fact that you’re writing about it is evidence of that,” Goldberg said. “He should have given that personal evidence way ahead of time. It’s not possible to serve and have hundreds of hearings. It was very hard for the [town] clerks and completely unnecessary.”