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.
He was at a test run of the voting process/machines.
He pocketed two of the ballots… then the count and verification process began.
He then started whispering to people “fucked up count”, started posting on social media that the machines were faulty, went outside, showed some other guy the two ballots he stole, and got a pat on the back from him.
… He very, very obviously did this to attempt to propagate a notion that the election is going to be rigged.
Also one could reasonably expect that as of yet unidentified pat-on-the-back man would also be a person of interest, as he may have directed Savage to actually do what he did.
Conspiracy to tamper with the voting process is… hopefully also a crime.
Ah, well that’s a horse of a different treason.
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
He could have kept them as personal souvenirs for what may go down as a pretty historical event.
Or he could plan to plant them somewhere as evidence of tampering.
“The votes on them are statistically meaningless” is incorrect though; I just went through an election where the two sides in one district differed by 27 votes.
The article explains he stole the 2 ballots on purpose to throw off a certification process that Indiana’s voting machines go through that’s open to the public.
The machines ran through 136 test ballots, then he stole 2 and left. He leaned over and is heard on video saying “fucked up count” to a women he was coordinating with, who then raised the issue of “missing ballots” to the officials, all while live streaming to facebook.
This guy, who then shows the stolen ballots to another guy outside who laughed and patted him on the back, then joined the live stream and said “they are missing ballots! Don’t trust anything!”
Cops reviewed video footage, then got a warrent. He claimed intially that he had been allowed go take them by officials. When they proved that wasent true, he claimed he took them as souvenirs, even though they were explicitly marked as official documents. Text messages that the suspect sent also make it clear he knew they were official ballots.
Honestly we will never know, he could have been using them to make tiny origami hats for frogs.
The sad truth is that the Trumpettes are going to see “man stole republican ballot”, stop reading further, and raise their burning
crossespitchforks.What a wonderful time to be alive…
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.