O’Keefe and Higby charged in Minnesota election-related case

James O’Keefe and Cam Higby are charged with unlawful voting. They did not vote.

That is not a technicality. It is the fact Hennepin County would prefer you to hurry past. During Minnesota’s August 11 primary, the two men went to Minneapolis-area precincts, gave election judges the names of registered voters who had not sent them, wore disguises, put on artificial accents, and filmed it. No ballots were cast. County Attorney Mary Moriarty says they deceived election workers and used real identities without authorization. Secretary of State Steve Simon says deception directed at those workers will not be tolerated. Cam Higby says nothing illegal happened and the point was to expose a weakness. O’Keefe, for now, has said nothing.

Start with the part Higby does not get to talk his way out of. Taking a living person’s name into a polling place without permission, so you can win an argument on video, is an abuse of that person. Those voters did not volunteer for a sting. The poll workers doing a long, dull, necessary job did not volunteer to be marks. A Right that means what it says about the rule of law does not invent an influencer exemption for identity games. If the footage shows what prosecutors describe, the defendants own that. Testing the system is a motive. It is not a permission slip.

Now look at what the approach found, because the disguises are being used to shut down a discussion they should have started. Minnesota does not require photo identification to vote. It allows same-day registration. It lets a registered voter vouch for the residency of people an election judge has never met. The pair said they were probing vouching. Prosecutors say it was impersonation, which vouching does not allow. Hold both descriptions up to the same recording. Strangers presented other people’s names, and the process did not die on contact. It went far enough that the state’s answer, after the fact, was a criminal charge for a vote that was never cast. A system that moves for a borrowed name and a bad accent is not secure. It is polite.

Republicans have made this case without the costumes. Show identification. Verify the roll. Treat a ballot as at least as serious as the card you already need for ordinary life. The professional reply, for years, has been that in-person impersonation is a fantasy — a suppression myth kept alive by sore losers. Rarity was always an odd comfort. A state that does not check will not find what it refuses to look for, and a crime that is easy does not stay theoretical merely because the last one was never counted. Then the fantasy walked into a Hennepin County precinct in a disguise, and the officials who called it a myth reached for the statute book. They did not reach for a photo-identification bill. They reached for a charge titled unlawful voting, minus the vote, and a lecture about confidence.

Confidence is doing too much work in that lecture. Simon can defend poll workers without pretending they wrote the rules they were told to apply. They did not. The people who wrote them have spent years insisting the door needs no lock, and they are furious at the men who rattled it on camera. Courtesy for election workers is legitimate. Offering that courtesy as a substitute for a lock is a con.

The prosecutor making the case has already shown how she ranks harm. Mary Moriarty offered a resolution in a Hennepin County murder case so soft that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison — Democrats, not talk-radio hosts — took the prosecution out of her hands. A dead young woman produced a plea offer her own party would not stand behind. An empty ballot box and a viral video produced charges for unlawful voting. Remember that the next time you are told this office simply follows the law wherever it leads. Priorities are a form of confession.

None of this canonizes O’Keefe. He is a provocateur, sometimes useful when an institution is lying, expensive when the stunt outruns the fact. The populist temptation will be to crown him a prisoner of conscience. Decline it. A movement serious about elections does not need borrowed names and fake accents. It needs a statute, a legislature willing to pass it, and a public tired of being called crazy for describing a hole it has now seen.

Glue the costume to the policy, and the policy never has to be defended. Call skepticism disruption, and a vouching regime survives the only question a polling place exists to answer: are you who you say you are? The workers deserve courtesy. The named voters deserve their identities back. Everyone else deserves a system that would have stopped the performance before a county attorney had to star in the sequel.

No ballot was cast. The charge is unlawful voting. If that does not embarrass the people who wrote the press release, it should embarrass the people asked to live under rules those officials still will not fix.