Former Democratic St. Joseph Elections Employee Pleads Guilty In Obama Ballot Petition Fraud

If former St. Joseph Co. Democratic Chairman Butch Morgan and several of his loyal Democratic foot soldiers hadn't conspired to forge voters names on the ballot petitions of the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama, then-Sen. Obama would have lacked the requisite number of signatures to get his name on the Indiana primary ballot, a blunder that likely would have cost him his razor-thin victory over Sen. Hillary Clinton for his party's nomination. Today, one of Morgan's loyal foot soldiers charged for her role in the scheme agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of forgery and testify against Morgan and two other Democratic election workers charged in the scheme. The South Bend Tribune's Madelyn Buckley has more on Beverly Shelton's guilty plea:

A former county employee has pleaded guilty to forgery and falsely making a petition, marking the first plea in the case of alleged ballot fraud in the 2008 Indiana primary election.

Beverly Shelton, a former voter registration worker, entered the plea this morning in front of St. Joseph County Superior Court Judge John Marnocha.

Shelton is accused, along with three others, of forging the signatures of hundreds of county residents on petitions that qualified Democratic presidential candidates for the primary ballot.

Also charged in the case are former St. Joseph County Democratic Party chairman Butch Morgan as well as Dustin Blythe and Pam Brunette, former employees of the county's voter registration office . . .

The range of punishment for forgery is two to eight years, and for falsely making a petition, six months to three years.

The state has also agreed to recommend Shelton receive no jail time if she testifies in the case against her co-defendants.

This is a major story that has been completely ignored by the media outside of South Bend. The Indianapolis Star has yet to report on this major event that occurred during the hardest fought Democratic primary in Indiana in decades, which Clinton barely won over Obama and wound up splitting the state's delegates with him. Although ballot signatures were forged on both Obama's and Clinton's petitions, only Obama was in danger of not having enough signatures to secure his place on the Indiana primary ballot in 2008. Efforts to forge signatures on both candidates' ballots was a classic Chicago strategy to ensure that neither candidate would raise the issue during the election. An investigative report by The Tribune and Howey Politics long after the 2008 election was over uncovered the ballot forging scheme.

In typical David Axelrod form, Democrats had attempted to keep John McCain's name off the Indiana Republican primary ballot in 2008 in an effort to embarrass him by claiming he filed an insufficient number of signatures to get on the ballot. That's nothing new for Obama. When Obama ran for office the first time seeking the seat of long-time incumbent State Sen. Alice Palmer in a heavily Democratic district, Obama hired a team of lawyers to challenge Palmer's and all of his primary opponents' ballot petitions. Their efforts paid off. Palmer and all of Obama's primary contenders were knocked off the ballot for allegedly lacking a sufficient number of registered voters residing in the senate district, leaving Obama alone on the ballot to win the seat uncontested. Obama's meteoric rise to power through backroom shenigans is remarkably similar to that of Adolph Hitler in post World War I Germany. We all know how that ended, and it now appears America is headed straight down the same path of self-destruction under his autocratic rule with a single-minded aim of collapsing the United States economically and stripping her citizens of their individual rights, wealth and freedom.