MADISON COUNTY, Ind. — A former Republican candidate running for an Indiana seat in the U.S. House of Representatives has been arrested and charged with stealing several election ballots during a recent voting machine test.
Larry L. Savage Jr., a candidate in the Republican 5th District primary held earlier this year, was arrested Tuesday morning by Madison County authorities and charged with destroying/misplacing a ballot and theft. He has since been released on a $500 cash bond.
The charges filed against Savage, a 51-year-old Anderson resident and precinct committeeman, stem from an incident on Oct. 3 in which two election ballots went missing at the Madison County Government Center during testing of the local voting machines.
Court documents show county officials began testing voting machines at 10 a.m. on Oct. 3, an event open to the public. Several citizens attended the tests and were allowed to run “test” ballots through the machines assigned to their county.
Despite being marked “test,” the ballots were still officially tracked and counted by the State and included real candidate names as well as differing votes. After testing, officials found one straight-Republican ballot and one write-in ballot were missing.
A review of security footage, which was subsequently being live-streamed online, showed Savage handling the two missing ballots. He can also be heard confirming with an election official that these are “absolutely, totally real ballots.”
In the video Savage can be seen looking around the room before folding up two ballots and putting them in his sweatshirt pocket.
Two ballots are nothing. The votes on them are statistically meaningless, and one of them was a vote for his guy. So why steal them? What else might he do with two real ballots? Could he maybe make more? Could he test a hack for the machines? Perhaps there’s a way to doctor the ballots to cause a machine malfunction?
There’s no believable excuse for wanting to keep those ballots that doesn’t include skullduggery.
This was an event to test and verify the voting machines and it was open to the public because it’s important for people to be able to trust the systems. He stole the ballots in order to throw off their count and manufacture a story because everything they do is baseless projection and all they have are their false claims of election interference and vote tampering.
And proved it worked great. Task failed successfully.
Even identified the “enemy within” trying to steal the election. Solid work.
Exactly this. The point was to cast doubt on the election process.
I get what you’re saying, but an intentional attack on the electoral process is an intentional attack on the United States Constitution and all that it encompasses. It’s only two ballots but it’s the voices of two people, and there are senate and congressional seats up for grabs. Furthermore, it emboldens others.
$500 bail is a couple million short imo. Do not give a mouse a cookie when it comes to our liberties. Squash the mouse
Edit: I’m also not any sort of hardass… But looking at this relative to other transgressions, it should be right up there with murder. Impeding on a country’s ability to self-govern is really really serious shit regardless of citizenship status (being a US citizen should not make it any less egregious), and it’s all getting normalized
Innocent people don’t lie repeatedly
Boredom and not taking anything seriously?
Yes I take my nihilism so far that I’m posting this from federal prison but it’s all good.