Misleading Project Veritas Video Wrongly Claims Illegal Voting in NJ

A new video from Project Veritas suggests illegal voting took place in New Jersey during Tuesday's gubernatorial election but the video actually shows the opposite.

In the conservative activist group's latest takedown-style video, an undercover operative speaking in an Irish accent tells a poll worker that he was in the United States on a work visa and had voted in the 2020 presidential election despite not being a registered voter or a citizen.

Another poll worker at the Essex County site says she remembered him voting in 2020.

“Remember, we were allowing anyone to come in,” she tells her colleague.

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The poll worker then takes out an orange vinyl envelope.

"I'll let you fill out completely a ballot now. Whether or not it’s going to count, I don’t know,” she says. "Listen, we'll let you do it. They'll figure that out."

Project Veritas makes it seem as if the non-citizen is being allowed to vote. But what The Project Veritas video does not point out, is that the poll worker was preparing a provisional ballot, which is meant for cases in which a voter claims to be eligible even though their name is not listed at a polling place's records.

Provisional ballots are investigated by county election boards, who determine whether the person who filled out the ballot is indeed eligible before the ballot is counted.

An example of how the system works

According to Ocean County Clerk Scott Colabella, that's exactly how the situation should have been handled.

"The way it works is you give your name to the poll worker and they look it up. And if they can't find it they say, 'I can't find you .. I cannot allow you to vote on a voting machine.' But New Jersey allows us to issue a provisional ballot. You can fill that out and nothing happens to that ballot on Election Day," Colabella said.

The ballot is returned to the county Board of Election sfor investigation after all the other ballots are counted. They will check to see if the person is registered and if a ballot was perhaps filled out and returned via mail.

Vote-by-mail ballots if postmarked by or on Election Day will still count if they arrive at the county election office by the Monday after Election Day.

"They look through everything they can possibly do to try and figure out why this person was not on the eligible list to cast a ballot on a machine that day in the polling place," Colabella said.

If the voter is found to be registered and there is no other ballot for them, the provisional ballot is then counted.

During the early hours of Election Day, many New Jersey polling locations had difficulty with the internet connection needed for the electronic poll books to accept voter signatures. As a result, poll workers handed those voters provisional ballots.

This is the second New Jersey election-related video released by the group founded by New Jersey native James O'Keefe that doesn't deliver on what the group promised.

Last week, the group released an undercover video claiming that Gov. Phil Murphy would provide financial aid to immigrants in the country illegally after his election, as if that were a secret. In reality, Murphy has publicly supported giving pandemic relief aid to unauthorized immigrants and his administration announced an application process for the aid on the day of that video's release.