Authorities probe possible election fraud

QUEENSBURY – Whether it’s election chicanery or else a legitimate effort to police voter fraud in the community, who ever is doing it shouldn’t be doing it, or else doesn’t appear to be doing it the right way.

It happened somewhere in the town of Queensbury this past Sunday. Two individuals came knocking on a woman’s front door to tell her she was illegally registered to vote.

“The big concern here is this woman was here in Warren County and the women who came to her door indicated they were elections officials — they had some name tags — they indicated they were from Washington county,” said Don Lehman, Warren county’s Director of Public Affairs, “It seems to be potentially impersonating elections staff and that’s obviously a big concern.”

The unknown visitors presented the woman with a blank New York State election complaint form, which Lehman says left her a bit shaken up. But the woman knew she hadn’t done anything wrong and had the where with all to contact her local Board of Elections.

“Seems to be some sort of concerted effort by a group to kind of look into election fraud,” Lehman suggests, “In this case, the person involved hadn’t committed any fraud. It was just kind of a paperwork issue.”

In other words, the woman, who recently moved to Queensbury, may have still been registered in her old voting district and the system hadn’t caught up with it yet.

Lehman says similar complaints involving bogus Board of Elections workers have been filed in other parts of the state this week.

“One of the questions,” Lehman says, “Does this seem to be one party targeting another? It doesn’t seem to be that way. It seems to be that all the voters who have been kind of confronted at their homes are various parties so it seems like they’re not really singling out party.”

At this point Lehman says he isn’t sure if other resident may have been visited but didn’t report it to authorities. If they have, he encourages them to contact the Board of Elections or local law enforcement.