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July 24, 2014

Guilty — Of the Crime That Doesn’t Exist…

Filed under: Probable Cause — Tags: , — Bill @ 8:31 am

ALARCONFormer Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon and his wife were convicted of voter fraud and perjury in Los Angeles Superior Court Wednesday.  Alarcon and his wife had lied about where he actually lived so he would be eligible to run for a particular Los Angeles City Council seat.  He and his wife both lied under oath in furtherance of his illegal candidacy.

Alarcon is not the first California official to be convicted of voter fraud in recent history.   In January 2014 State Senator Roderick Wright was convicted of voter fraud and perjury for lying about his residence so he could run for the state senate.

Fortunately for the citizens of Los Angeles County, they have a Prosecuting Attorney who takes public corruption seriously enough to have a Public Integrity Division in his office.   Here is more but somewhat dated information about the Division and a sampling of cases it has prosecuted.

There are many people who deny the existence of voter fraud.   It’s fair to say that many of the deniers are those who choose to engage in fraud as candidates or encourage it as lazy or incompetent county clerks and  secretaries of state as well as politically-directed prosecutors and state attorneys general.

As the State of California and Los Angeles County in particular have shown, they pursue voter fraud rather than deny it exists.

3 Comments

  1. Los Angeles Times Editorial, July 24, 2014
    “The residency requirement is not a technicality; it’s a core tenet of our democratic system enshrined in the law. No politician should gain an advantage by lying, and no prosecutor should ignore evidence of voter fraud.”

    Comment by Susie Snedaker — July 24, 2014 @ 5:11 pm

  2. So, how was this caught? I would like to know more. What kind of ‘state of the art’ voting equipment was used? Or, did they not have any, and it is all fixed now?

    Comment by Stebbijo — July 24, 2014 @ 10:07 pm

  3. Stebbijo,

    I don’t have an exact answer, but according to the LA Times, Alarcon was indicted by a state grand jury in August 2010 on charges of voter fraud and perjury. That followed a 15-month investigation by the LA County District Attorney’s Public Integrity Division. The investigation involved serving search warrants on both Alarcon’s homes and subpoenaing at least six of Alarcon’s staff to testify in front of the criminal grand jury.

    The essence of the case against Alarcon and his wife was that while their Panorama City home was inside Alarcon’s district, they chose to live in their nicer home in Sun Valley which is not inside his district. Above and beyond that, they voted in several elections illegally by falsely listing their residence for voter registration as the Panorama City home. Their lying about where they really lived when they voted was perjury.

    One indication of how thorough the prosecutor’s PID investigators were: As part of the search warrant service on the Panorama City home, the investigators seized an egg from the refrigerator in the kitchen. They timely had the egg tested by an egg expert (now there’s a real resume-builder!) who testified at trial that the egg was over a year old.

    Comment by Bill — July 25, 2014 @ 6:53 am

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