Daniel Dale for CNN:
The mysterious case of Rosemarie Hartle’s vote in the last presidential election, three years after her death, was trumpeted in November 2020 by the Nevada Republican Party and various prominent conservatives. From then-President Donald Trump on down, Republicans used stories about phony votes cast under the names of dead people as key evidence for their claim that Joe Biden’s victory was marred by major fraud.
The Hartle mystery is now solved. And it turns out that the fraud was committed by a Republican.
Hartle was married to Las Vegas businessman Donald Kirk Hartle, a registered Republican. In November 2020, Hartle told Las Vegas television station 8 News Now (KLAS-TV) that he felt “disbelief” when he found out that a mail-in ballot was submitted in his late wife’s name. It was “pretty sickening,” he said at the time, adding that he didn’t know how it could’ve happened.
But Hartle had actually cast the phony ballot himself.
On Tuesday, Hartle pleaded guilty to the crime of voting more than once in the same election. The judge, 8 News Now reported, said Hartle had pulled what seemed like a “cheap political stunt that kind of backfired and shows that our voting system actually works because you were ultimately caught.”
Indeed. And it isn’t the first time something like this has happened.In November 2020, the Trump campaign highlighted a case in which a ballot was cast in the name of a long-dead Pennsylvania woman. Her son later pleaded guilty to casting that ballot for Trump, saying, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, he had “listened to too much propaganda and made a stupid mistake.”
So there is a smattering of confirmed cases in which ballots were indeed illegally cast in the names of dead people, and we might perhaps learn of some more cases over time. Early this year, Nevada’s secretary of state referred 10 “questionable” cases to law enforcement for investigation.
But Trump’s vague assertions that thousands of ballots were cast in the names of dead people in various key states were entirely baseless; his massive numbers were plain fictional. Some specific ballots the Trump campaign claimed were fraudulent, meanwhile, were quickly proven to be legitimate ballots cast by living people with the same or similar names as dead people.
And Republican voters were responsible for some of the small number of known crimes.