Former City Councilman John Brown, who played a significant role in a voter fraud scheme concocted by Democrats in the city of Troy, had his conviction and sentence upheld last week.
Via the Troy Record:
The Appellate Division of state Supreme Court has ruled that former Troy City Councilman John Brown cannot challenge his sentence for his guilty plea in the city’s 2009 Working Families Party ballot-fraud scandal.
In a unanimous decision Thursday, the court ruled that Brown had waived his right to appeal and therefore could not challenge his sentence.
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According to published reports, Brown plans to appeal the ruling because his cooperation in the probe was not taken into consideration at sentencing.
Brown originally faced the prospect of seven years in jail for his role in the ballot forgeries. A plea deal sought to reduce those charges in exchange for his cooperation.
When the investigation into the Democrats activities started to heat up, Brown concocted a scheme in which he tried to convince Working Families Party members to put out a press release blaming the entire scandal on former city DPW Commissioner Bob Mirch, a Republican.
Brown pled guilty to second-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument and was sentenced to 6 months in prison and five years probation. The prosecutor in the case had tried to argue that Brown be allowed to serve the jail time on weekends so as not to interfere with his new job, a motion the judge struck down.
In all, four Democrats involved in the voter fraud scandal were sentenced last year for their respective roles, receiving punishments ranging from hundreds of hours of community service, to jail time. The group consisted of a former city clerk, an ex-City Councilman, a Democrat operative, and a Committeeman who a year ago had declared ballot forgery in upstate New York to be “a normal political tactic“.
Democrats preyed on those they felt were the most vulnerable members of society, those making easy targets for their voter fraud scheme.
For instance:
They targeted immigrants who struggled with the English language and had little knowledge of the U.S. election process.
They targeted college kids with little money, paying them for their voter registration cards.
They targeted people living in low-income housing because there was a sense that poor people were “less likely to ask any questions”.
They tricked mentally disabled individuals into signing over their absentee ballots.
They targeted these people because of their susceptibility to such fraud, but also the unlikeliness that these groups would ever catch on to the scheme, and if so, the unlikeliness that they would ever report it.
The Democrats sentenced last year admitted to a range of criminal activity – from falsifying business records, to offering a false instrument, straight up to flat-out forgery.
