“If he were my son I would spank him.”
That’s how the widow of a North Carolina man whose name was presented at a polling station by an activist working with James O’Keefe‘s Project Veritas responded to a video the group released this week showing an individual using her deceased husband’s name.
As Media Matters points out, Michael Bolton, Jr. — a very much alive son of the widow who spoke to TPM — is registered to vote at the same address as his recently deceased father. The poll watcher in the extended version of the O’Keefe video asks if he was the junior Bolton to which the Project Veritas operative responds: “That would be correct.”
“I don’t like the way they just felt that they could use my husband’s name and put it out there,” the widow told TPM. “It just wasn’t right. My husband just died, and then they do that? Why didn’t they use somebody from a year ago or five years ago. It was just very insensitive.”
Winifred, wife to Michael G. Bolton and mother of Michael G. Bolton, Jr., said she supported the implementation of voter ID laws O’Keefe’s group backs, she just wished they’d talked to her first.
“I agree that there should be picture ID, I don’t understand why you don’t have to have picture ID, I don’t understand how that is so hard to get,” Bolton told TPM. “I sort of wish they had called first and asked permission, because it was very unnerving. I’m sympathetic to the message that they’re trying to get out, but being a new widow, it was really unnerving when it went up there. I am upset that it was a little insensitive that they didn’t call.”
Bolton told TPM that one of the polling watchers informed her that someone had tried to vote on behalf of her son when she went to vote. The poll watchers told her the individual acted weird and nervous. Her son returned to the polling station to vote later in the day. She found out about the Project Veritas video after her sister saw it on Facebook.
This isn’t the first O’Keefe voter fraud video which has confused a living voter for a dead one. Project Veritas’ New Hampshire sting mixed up a 23-year-old voter for a dead 84-year-old. Meanwhile, Think Progress reports that the North Carolina video has other flaws — two of the “non-citizens” in O’Keefe’s latest video turned out to be naturalized citizens.
