Election/democracy denier and Minnehaha County Auditor Leah Anderson finally caught someone committing election fraud: Republican Senator Tom Pischke.
According to an arrest warrant affidavit filed Monday, June 22, Anderson noticed in March that 16 statement forms for Republican precinct committeepeople, who get to be delegates at the Republican state convention, and the nine envelopes in which they arrived had “very similar handwriting”. Her staff noticed some addresses on those forms didn’t match the purported signers’ voter registration addresses. Staff called the purported signers, and a majority said they hadn’t filed to be precinct committeepeople. Anderson checked other documents with verifiable signatures from 15 of the 16 purported candidates and found no matches with the signatures on the dubious documents.
The handwriting on those 16 documents did match the handwriting on the precinct committeeman statement that Tom Pischke filed on January 7.
Good eye, Leah!
Minnehaha County Sheriff’s Office Detective Phillip Leidholt went to Senator Pischke’s house in Dell Rapids to ask Pischke about these documents. Pischke denied forging any of them. But Detective Leidholt cites video surveillance from a Dell Rapids city camera showing what appears to be Tom Pischke’s car (the only tan 2000–2005 Chevy Impala in South Dakota with “JP1” as characters 2 through 4 on the license plate) stopping at a blue mail drop box near Dell Rapids City Hall on March 27. More damningly, the South Dakota Forensic Lab matched DNA on a swab taken from Pischke with DNA on the envelopes Anderson received with the apparently forged documents.
Senator Pischke has thus been arrested on two felony charges of offering a false or forged instrument for filing.
Pischke appears to have had the ridiculous idea of stacking the convention floor with delegates of his own choosing; now he’s withdrawn from attending this weekend’s convention himself. He has also handed his independent opponent in the general election, former District 23 Republican Senator Bryan Breitling, an easy campaign line: “My opponent is a felon; I’m not!”
Pischke has Trumpishly squawked about “election integrity”; now his fellow election conspiracist Leah Anderson has caught him in the act of undermining the integrity of elections. Even if Pischke clings to his position on the ballot and beats Breitling in November, the 2007 Senate would be well within law and morality to refuse to seat this lawbreaker.
Par for the course.
Come on Cory, how can you think being a convicted felon is reasonable to vote against a Republican candidate? Trump has made being a felon nearly a requirement for office.
I want to say the guy is a walking, talking example of scofflaw, but that term usually applies to low-level criminals. He’s been in hot water over domestic violence, which ended his marriage. That’s a serious legal issue. He’s used his legislative position to try to force his ex and other abused women to share custody of children. Now he’s been caught red-handed committing massive election fraud, like nobody has ever seen in South Dakota. Sure, the fraud involves a score for low-level political hack jobs, but we elect those position because they do have important duties that involve selecting some candidates that will appear on the ballot. Pischke is a firm supporter of making initiatives much harder to pass, which goes right along with his belief in tyranny, whether in a family or in government.
I was born in Dell Rapids, I know Dell Rapids, I have friends in Dell Rapids, and Tom Pischke is no Dell Rapidian.
Republicans get so upset over election fraud when the fraud cases that have come to light are cases involving Republicans. The two cases in Minnesota from the last election were fraud by Republicans. One in Hubbard county where a Republican election judge let 11 of his buddies vote without registration and the other was outside Duluth area where a Republican daughter voted for her deceased mother.
The job of precinct committee person is they are the delegates to the state convention who select the nominees for AG, SOS, Treasurer, Auditor, PUCs, And Commissioner of School and Public Lands.
Additionally, if a candidate needs to be replaced by by August 11th, the precinct committee people get a vote in that process, too.
It’s an important job, so fraudulent filings for those positions need to be taken seriously. It is unfortunate that most of the electorate has no idea who their precinct people are or what the do.
Hopefully none of the fraudulently filed people will be credentialed at the convention. But you never know.
As for the District 25, I have predicted that after Jon Hansen’s drubbing in the gubernatorial primary, Pischke will withdraw from the Senate race and Jon Hansen will take his place. But Hanson will need the votes of the district’s precinct committee people to do that.
I guess I don’t get it. Please explain how he was to have personally benefited from this?
Keith, the precinct committee people do not just get voting privileges at the state convention, they also vote in candidate replacement meetings between the primary and August 11, and in the county party election of officers in January after the general election.
my suspicion about Bucholz is that he is a placeholder who would win the nomination for the House in the primary and then drop out. Pischke would drop out of the Senate race, and at the candidate replacement meeting, The precinct committee people would vote to have Pischke replace Bucholz and Hansen would replace Pischke.
District 25 has been doing this sort of thing for years..
in past years, Pischke openly circulated petitions at county meetings for one chamber, while covertly circulating petitions for the other; Heinemann and Gross have switched places in two different years, Symens declared she was running and then dropped out immediately after the filing deadline. All these shenanigans have been orchestrated to discourage other people from running for office, and made me personally distrustful of any candidate for office who shows up at a county meeting circulating positions for an office he has no intention of actually running for. They are lying.
Thank you.
This is actual, verifiable proof of election fraud, not the abundant proof lies Dems did it from the sleepy/felon/rapist and magats.