In October of this year, AMAC, its AMAC Action advocacy team, and the AMAC Foundation joined forces with The American Constitutional Rights Union (ACRU) and ACRU Action to ensure that elderly voters are heard and protected as the nation prepares for the 2024 general election. ACRU is the nation’s leading advocate for protection of vulnerable senior voters, particularly those in senior centers, assisted living facilities, and nursing homes, from partisan manipulation of their votes.
ACRU’s President Lori Roman noted, “We’ve received reports of cognitively impaired facility residents having their ballot choices made by staff, sometimes under coercion and often without their knowledge. Other complaints have uncovered activist groups across the country collecting ballots from residential facilities with the promise that the ballots would be delivered to election officials. The chain of custody and security of ballots should be a foremost concern.”
The evidence of real and tangible voter fraud against vulnerable senior voters is growing. In their August 2022 Townhall article, ACRU Board Members, former Attorney General Edwin Meese III and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell declare the problem is widespread. For example, they wrote, “In Wisconsin, the state assembly appointed a special counsel to investigate vote fraud in nursing homes after an investigation by a county sheriff uncovered evidence indicating numerous cases of vote fraud in a nursing home. Special Counsel Michael Gableman, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice, released a report in March 2022 indicating ‘rampant fraud and abuse occurred statewide’ at Wisconsin’s nursing homes and other residential care facilities.”
Moreover, “In 2020, a Texas social worker was indicted on 134 felony counts of vote fraud for registering mentally incapacitated citizens to vote without their consent. And in 2022, an employee at the Father Murray Nursing Center in Macomb County, Michigan, was sentenced to jail for forging signatures on absentee ballot applications. This abuse of vulnerable voters is not acceptable,” said Roman.
This mounting evidence led AMAC to take action by joining forces with ACRU. AMAC CEO Rebecca Weber declared that “It is time to take measures to ensure not only the safety of seniors who reside in these facilities but to demand that their rights — including voting rights — are protected.”
AMAC is also very pleased that Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has also joined with ACRU and now AMAC in joint efforts to expose and put an end to elder voter fraud, particularly fraud found in nursing homes and other senior citizen facilities. According to Dr. King, her uncle “fought to ensure that every single American had the right to vote freely [but] many of those voters are nursing home residents who are often targeted by those who would steal or suppress their votes.”
The ACRU’s Protect Elderly Votes Project provides a Senior Citizen Voter Bill of Rights that has been used by many facilities across the country. In addition in 2022, ACRU launched the Center for Vulnerable Voters (www.centerforvulnerablevoters.org) providing a guide for citizens and family members who wish to protect the rights of vulnerable voters – all of which can be a valuable resource for AMAC members.
AMAC CEO Rebecca Weber says that America’s electoral process is still “under siege” as we look ahead to the 2024 general election and that AMAC’s joint venture with ACRU comes at a time when the fate of our nation “remains in the balance – and that balance is fair and honest elections in which the votes of all voting Americans are properly cast and counted.” AMAC and with its affiliate AMAC Action and the AMAC Foundation are committed to continue to work toward achieving strong election integrity legislation in all states.
