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appears to have had the ridiculous idea of stacking the convention floor with delegates of his own choosing; now he’s withdrawn from attending this weekend’s convention himself.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.