Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty on Wednesday charged conservative provocateur James O'Keefe and influencer Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft, over undercover videos they shot at Minneapolis polling places during the Aug. 11 primary, according to MPR News.
The complaints allege the pair visited four Hennepin County precincts and impersonated four different voters, Fox 9 reports. Prosecutors say the names they gave were real: some belonged to residents who had died, and at least one to a person who had already voted, MPR reports. At one school precinct, a team member gave the first and last name of an actual registered voter before asking how the state's vouching law works, KSTP reports.
Vouching lets a registered voter in a precinct swear to an unregistered neighbor's address by signing an oath. A voter may vouch for up to eight people. In the August videos, the O'Keefe team's members, in traditional Muslim dress and accents, asked election judges how vouching works, then left when told they would have to sign the oath. MPR reports neither man signed one, and the group says nobody cast a ballot.
That is the crux of the case. Moriarty's argument is that stating a false identity to an election judge is already part of applying for a ballot. "They did begin to apply," she said, calling vouching "a multi-step process," according to Fox 9. She also acknowledged that being provocative is not a crime, but misidentifying oneself at a polling place is, MPR reports.
The stakes are lower than the charge sheet suggests. Moriarty said a conviction would likely bring presumptive probation under state sentencing guidelines, perhaps with some local jail time, and called it "a low level offense in terms of Minnesota felonies," Fox 9 reports. Journalist Breanna Morello, who posted the charging documents, said O'Keefe faces up to 10 years if convicted. She wrote that it is important to note O'Keefe and Cameron Higby entered multiple polling places while disguised but never signed the oath or casted a ballot. Neither man has been arrested, and initial court appearances are set for Nov. 16, per MPR.
Higby responded on X that the charges would "take my right to vote away," calling them "lawfare." In a statement he said the project "was conducted to expose vulnerabilities in the Minnesota voting system." "I never voted, I never signed an affidavit, and I never violated a law," he said, per Fox 9. O'Keefe's group, which calls itself the Justice League, has said it "did not impersonate anyone."
Secretary of State Steve Simon, whose office alerted prosecutors, has taken the opposite view. He said the group meant "to cast doubt on one or more Minnesota election laws" but "revealed their ignorance of how those laws actually work," KSTP reports. Vouching accounted for under 0.6% of Minnesota votes in 2024, and Simon said he does not recall a vouching fraud case during his tenure.
The charges follow weeks of official scrutiny. In August, Simon said poll workers had reported the visits at once and that "law enforcement is reviewing the situation," per an earlier report from MPR, which also noted that a voter who falsely signs a vouching oath commits perjury, a felony carrying up to five years.
The vouching rules were already in federal sights. In January, the Justice Department demanded Minnesota's vouching records, with Civil Rights chief Harmeet Dhillon saying the law "seems facially inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act of 2002," according to KSTP. No further federal action has been reported, and an earlier DOJ voter-registration suit against Minnesota was dismissed.