Right-wing activist James O’Keefe charged with unlawful voting, identity theft

Jonathan Assbutt Jr. said:

This does nothing to refute my claim. You're still an idiot that doesn't know how to argue.

Regarding the actual claims in the tweet and your post, here's what Grok had to say:


**No. The X post's core claims are inaccurate or heavily distorted.** Minnesota does have a longstanding Election Day registration "vouching" process for proof of *residence*, but the post misstates the rules, misapplies them to ordinary apartment buildings, invents or exaggerates "Somali Towers" unlimited-vouching mechanics, falsely labels the process "illegal," and provides no evidence that it fraudulently elected Ilhan Omar (or that non-citizens/ineligible people systematically voted that way).

### What Minnesota law actually allows
Minnesota permits same-day voter registration. One accepted form of *proof of residence* (not citizenship or identity) is vouching:

- A registered voter from the *same precinct* can accompany someone to the polls and sign a sworn oath confirming the person’s address/residence in the precinct. One such registered voter can do this for **up to 8** people on Election Day. Someone who was themselves vouched for that day cannot then vouch for others. The oath is under penalty of perjury; election judges record it.
- Separately, an *employee* of a defined **"residential facility"** (nursing homes, assisted living, veterans’ homes, licensed group homes, shelters for the homeless or domestic violence victims, certain transitional/housing-support settings, etc.—not ordinary apartments or private residential high-rises) can vouch for residents of *that facility*. There is no numerical cap for facility staff, but the employee must prove employment (badge, letter, pre-submitted list, etc.), and it still only proves residence for people living in the facility.

Vouching is **not** a free pass with "zero verification." The person registering still completes a registration application affirming U.S. citizenship and eligibility, and typically provides a Minnesota driver’s license/ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number (which is later checked against databases). Already-registered voters generally do not need ID to vote; the vouching path is mainly for people registering or updating residence on Election Day who lack other proof (driver’s license with current address, utility bill + photo ID, etc.). The system has existed for decades.

Ordinary multi-unit residential buildings (apartments, condos, high-rises) are **not** "residential facilities" under the statute. Tenants or building staff of regular apartment towers cannot vouch for unlimited numbers of people under the special facility rule. The post’s claim that "tenants of large residential buildings can vouch for UNLIMITED people" is false.

### "Somali Towers" and the 80,000 figure
Cedar-Riverside / "Little Mogadishu" in Minneapolis includes large apartment complexes such as Riverside Plaza (sometimes called towers or the Skyline complex in older references). These house a significant Somali-American population, but they are standard residential apartment buildings, not the statutory "residential facilities" that allow unlimited staff vouching. There is no special legal exception turning them into unlimited-vouching sites.

Census estimates of people of Somali ancestry in Minnesota have typically been in the roughly 40k–70k range in recent years (not a precise fixed 80,000 of voting-age citizens all living in one set of towers and all voting via this method). Community estimates are sometimes higher, but the post’s framing is inflated and selective.

### Ilhan Omar’s elections
Omar first won a Minnesota House seat (District 60B) in 2016 after a competitive DFL primary and a general election in a heavily Democratic district. She later won the U.S. House 5th District seat. Vote totals and turnout in those races were far larger than any plausible number of same-day vouching registrations concentrated in a few buildings. There is no credible evidence or official finding that her victories resulted from illegal voting via vouching (or any other systematic fraud). Past claims linking her or Somali voters to organized ballot schemes have not been substantiated as decisive or proven fraud that flipped outcomes.

### Framing and overall accuracy
- The process is **legal** under Minnesota law, not "illegal." Calling it illegal is false.
- It is not limited to Somalis; it is a general rule available statewide.
- "Zero verification" overstates the case—there is a sworn oath, recording requirements, later data checks on the registration form, and perjury exposure.
- The leap to "this is exactly how Ilhan got in office" and "fraudulently elected" is unsupported conjecture. Vouching volume exists (tens of thousands of uses in recent cycles in some reports, often for address updates), but it is a small share of total votes and is not proven to be systematically fraudulent or decisive in her races.
- Scott Presler and others have accurately noted the existence of the 8-person and facility-employee rules and raised concerns about potential vulnerability (especially with same-day registration). Those concerns are debatable as policy. The specific post’s version, however, adds inaccurate details about unlimited tenant vouching in ordinary skyscrapers and the causal claim about Omar.

In short: Minnesota’s vouching rules are real and relatively permissive on residence proof, which reasonably prompts integrity debates. The X post’s specific narrative—illegal unlimited voting by 80,000 Somalis in "Somali Towers" that fraudulently put Omar in office—is not accurate.

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MTTiger19 said:

Ahhh. Exposing fraud is disgusting. Got it. Are you insinuating if he hadn’t filmed and posted this on X you’d fully support the exposure of said fraud? You just don’t like how he did it?

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Jonathan Assbutt Jr. said:

What it’s about​

Jonathan Assbutt Jr. opens with a story from The Hill. Hennepin County (Minnesota) charged James O’Keefe and Cam Higby with felonies. According to the article, during the August primary they went into polling places, gave election judges the names of real registered voters and started applying for ballots, all on camera. The stunt was meant to show that Minnesota’s Election Day “vouching” system is easy to abuse.

The core argument​

Right side (MTTiger19, TigerGrowls, Scrubby, DailyBuck7):

• O’Keefe is a whistleblower being punished for exposing a loophole.
• Prosecutors’ own documents say neither man cast a ballot.
• It’s selective prosecution by a progressive DA.
• Vouching without ID is an open door to fraud.

Left side (Jonathan Assbutt Jr., tigres88, pjhawk, fskillet):

• He didn’t expose any fraud except his own.
• The crime is lying about your identity to apply for a ballot, not casting one. Jonathan cites Minnesota Statute 204C.14 and quotes the county attorney saying the costumes and politics played no role.
• tigres88 had the sharpest point of the whole thread: the system “quite literally did inhibit fraud in this case,” because the guys trying it got caught.

Who won: the left side, fairly clearly, on the legal question. “He never cast a ballot” is true but doesn’t matter if the law covers applying under a false identity. Nobody on the right ever engaged with the statute. What they did instead:

• TigerGrowls pasted tweets and threw insults.
• MTTiger19 answered with “Lol.”
• Scrubby’s “he never signed anything” bit got waved off as trolling.

The right side did have one legitimate point buried in there: whether vouching without ID is a good policy. Nobody made that case well, though. It turned into unverified “80,000 Somalis in skyscrapers” claims, and Jonathan answered with a Grok fact-check saying the post misstates what vouching actually covers.


I didn’t independently check the statute or the vouching rules. This is about who argued better from what they posted, not a legal ruling.

Best​

tigres88 (7 posts): best one-liners and best at calling out derailing. “It quite literally did inhibit fraud” was the knockout line. He also called out DailyBuck7’s pile of whataboutism (“holy whataboutism batman”) and caught him contradicting himself about whether he talks about voter fraud. He did get preachy with the “I don’t virtue signal, literally ever” post.


Jonathan Assbutt Jr. (9 posts): most substance, worst temper. He brought the article, the charging details, the county attorney’s quotes, the actual statute and a fact-check of the Lancaster, PA claim. His line that providing quotes and the actual law “is how grown ups argue” is fair. He then called TigerGrowls a “retard” twice in the same thread, which kind of undercuts the grown-up thing. His sourcing leaned on AI summaries (ChatGPT- and Grok-style answers) more than primary sources.


fsu1jreed (2 posts): quiet but useful. He brought actual Milwaukee nursing-home voting data to counter DailyBuck7. When DailyBuck tried to generalize, he corrected that the high-turnout homes were “a handful with 12 and 8 registered voters.”


fskillet and pjhawk. fskillet’s line about how you’d think the “law and order” party would be thrilled that more criminality was found was a clean jab. pjhawk was blunt and called people “MAGA morons,” but he was on point.


DailyBuck7 (5 posts): the most interesting one. He’s all over the place, with a rant about George Floyd riots, ICE, Portland lasers and “Somali felon fraudsters,” plus a claim that 90% of Americans are felons. Then out of nowhere he admits Trump never proved 2020 fraud and calls the “bigger crowds means I won Georgia” argument one of the stupidest he’s heard. He’s scattered, but he’s honest in a way most posters here aren’t.

Worst​

TigerGrowls (9 posts): the worst poster in the thread.

• He pasted social-media posts in all caps (“This is MADNESS”) and called O’Keefe and Higby “heroes.”
• Four of his posts are just images.
• His insults were “smelly dumocrat” and “Linus.”
• He made sweeping claims (Somalis vouching for 10+ people, “Ilhan Omar wasn’t elected by Americans”) without a single source.
• His comeback to a statute citation was “you don’t have a claim.” He never touched the law.

MTTiger19 (5 posts). He opened with “arrest the whistleblower, not the fraudsters, the Democrat way!” When asked to show the fraud, he offered a trade: he’d admit there was none if the other side admitted no-ID systems invite fraud. When tigres88 knocked that down, he replied “Lol” and disappeared.


PedMaller3 (2 posts). His posts were an image-only whataboutism (“Is that as bad as this?”) and one empty post. He contributed nothing, but at least this time he didn’t throw slurs.


Scrubby. His fake dialogue mocking the charges was clever-ish but misleading, since the charge isn’t about casting a ballot. tigres88 called it “troll king” stuff.

Overall​

It’s a 5/10, way above the other two. It’s an actual partisan argument with sources, and the slurs are mostly limited to Jonathan’s two “retard” posts and TigerGrowls’s name-calling. It still drifted into whataboutism (Ilhan Omar, Somalis, George Floyd, LLC laws), and the right side never seriously engaged the legal question. The left side won on the facts as posted, but they acted smug and nasty about it.

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