Nationally renowned investigative reporter James O’Keefe has offered some new reflections on his recent undercover mission to Alaska in which he exposed election vulnerabilities during the state’s Aug. 18 primary.
Equipped with hidden cameras, O’Keefe’s team visited several polling places in Alaska to test whether it was possible to vote without an ID or even under another person’s name.
“Anchorage, Alaska. Primary day. There is a folding table, a laminated binder, and a perfectly nice woman working the poll book the way she probably has for years,” O’Keefe wrote in an Aug. 28 reflection on his Alaska trip. “I give her a name. It is not my name. The name is Brian Murkowski. He is the brother of a sitting United States Senator. He does not live in Alaska. He lives in Texas.”
O’Keefe then notes that he told the poll worker that he did not have his ID.
“She looks up at me and says, ‘Absolutely possible,’” he recalled. “I asked her again anyway, because I wanted it recorded and I wanted it to be completely unmistakable to anyone who watched it later. All I have to do is fill out the question ballot, and then I can vote?”
“Yes, sir,” the woman responded.
O’Keefe summarized the encounter with five points:
— ONE. A total stranger walked in off the street carrying no identification of any kind and was offered a ballot.
— TWO. The name on that ballot belongs to a United States Senator’s brother who lives roughly three thousand miles away, in another state entirely.
— THREE. We did it again. Different polling place, same morning. One of my reporters gave the name Karina Waller — Senator Murkowski’s own State Director. No ID. Same offer.
— FOUR. Alaska law says you show identification to get a ballot, and the one narrow exception written into it is that the poll worker personally knows the person standing in front of them. Nobody in either of those buildings had ever laid eyes on us before in their lives.
— FIVE. Nobody wrote anything down. Nobody picked up a phone. Nobody flagged a single thing. We asked, we got our answer, and we walked back out the door.
O’Keefe’s mission was to expose vulnerabilities in Alaska’s voting system, while applying pressure on Sen. Murkowski to support the voter-ID SAVE Act, which she has adamantly refused to do.
“Senator Murkowski has spent this year fighting the SAVE Act, which her office describes as ‘an overly burdensome, one-size-fits-all mandate from Washington,’ and the argument underneath that position has always been the same one we hear everywhere: that the hole we keep describing does not actually exist outside of our imagination,” O’Keefe reflected. “We just showed her the hole. In her own state. Using her own brother’s name.”
But rather than acknowledging O’Keefe’s findings, Murkowski chose to criticize the reporters.
“Her office did not say they were going to fix it,” O’Keefe wrote. “Her office said this: ‘Voter impersonation is a crime and should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.’”
O’Keefe made it clear, however, that he never broke the law during the investigation.
“I did not vote. I did not sign anyone’s name. I never touched a ballot,” he said. “I asked a question, I recorded the answer, and I left. That is what reporters do. The response from a sitting United States Senator’s office was to start talking about prosecuting me for it.”
O’Keefe titled the video, “The Big Murkowski.”
“A stranger with no ID was offered a United States Senator’s brother’s ballot, and the Senator’s office answered by talking about prosecuting the man who filmed it,” O’Keefe concluded.
O’Keefe published a second video, exposing claims by Murkowski that the SAVE Act would be difficult to impossible to implement in Alaska – a vast and sparsely populated state in which many communities are only accessible by plane or boat.
Specifically, O’Keefe traveled to Unalaska, a location Murkowski used in a presentation on why she refused to support the SAVE Act. In interviewing prominent residents on the ground, O’Keefe demonstrated that Murkowski’s claims were largely unfounded and misleading.
