The claims, checked
- Moriarty charged O'Keefe and Higby with felonies: Confirmed. Each faces two felony counts, unlawful voting and identity theft, filed October 28. Both were issued summonses and are due in court November 16.
- They gave election judges the names of real registered voters: Confirmed. O'Keefe's video shows him giving the name of William Pomeranz, a registered Minneapolis voter, and Higby gave names that were not his own; Moriarty says some of the names belonged to people who had died. O'Keefe's group says it "did not impersonate anyone" and only "stated a name."
- They never took a ballot: Confirmed. Both men's videos show them leaving the check-in table before any ballot was issued, MPR News reported in August that they "do not vote or attempt to register in the video," and Moriarty said, "I think it's pretty clear they did not intend to vote." Her office says the crime came earlier, when they gave real voters' names while applying for a ballot, and Higby said beforehand that he wanted to see whether workers would "give me the ballots of random people who are actually registered to vote."
- They never signed the oath: Confirmed. "Both men stopped short of signing the oath we all sign before receiving our ballot," Moriarty said. Higby says on camera that he "didn't touch any documents." Moriarty says they left when election judges asked them to sign, and that signing falsely would have been perjury.
- They told the poll workers what they were doing: Not supported. In both videos the explanation is given to the camera after they walk away. At the table, O'Keefe gave the name of a real voter, William Pomeranz, asked about vouching and left saying he would go get the friends he wanted to vouch for. Moriarty says they never identified themselves as journalists, which she says is required in a polling place.
- No one was put in danger and no vote was affected: Supported. No ballot was issued, poll workers reported the visits, and Pomeranz voted that evening "without a problem." Moriarty said "the system worked exactly the way it should have" because judges asked the men to sign the oath and "they found reasons to go away." Pomeranz said learning his identity had been used "was pretty much a shock."
- The videos proved anyone, even a noncitizen, can vote in Minnesota: Partly. Poll workers confirmed on camera that a voter already on the rolls needs no ID, which is Minnesota law; the checks are a signed oath carrying a felony penalty and a records review after the election, and someone registering through vouching must still give a Minnesota driver's license or ID number or the last four digits of a Social Security number. No noncitizen was tested, and one poll worker told Higby that a would-be registrant with no photo ID could not register.
- The same office gave a no-prison plea deal to a man convicted in a teenager's rape, now accused of a new kidnapping and rape: Confirmed. Abdimahat Bille Mohamed was sentenced to probation in May 2025 and charged again that December. Moriarty says the loss of critical witnesses weakened the case.
- The same office did not charge a man accused of vandalizing six Teslas: Confirmed. In April 2025 it sent him to pre-charge diversion with restitution, saying that is its standard approach for first-time, low-level property offenders. Moriarty disputes that this was a decision not to prosecute: "We did not decline it."
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged James O'Keefe, the conservative undercover journalist who founded Project Veritas, and influencer Cam Higby on Wednesday, October 28, with felony unlawful voting and identity theft over hidden-camera videos they filmed at Minneapolis polling places during Minnesota's August 11 primary. By Moriarty's own account, neither man signed an oath or meant to vote: "Both men stopped short of signing the oath we all sign before receiving our ballot," she told reporters. Her office says the crime came earlier, when both men "misrepresented their identities by giving election judges names of registered voters in the precinct without those voters' knowledge or permission." O'Keefe calls the prosecution "a landmark First Amendment case," and the U.S. Justice Department told the Daily Caller it is "reviewing the police report, video, and other available material" and is "concerned about intimidation related to First Amendment activity."
Critics of the charges call Moriarty soft on crime, and Profoundd compared the charges with how her office has handled other cases. Republican state Rep. Walter Hudson's Hot Air column ran under the headline "James O'Keefe Faces Charges Brought by Soft on Crime Prosecutor." In 2025 the office agreed to a no-prison plea deal for Abdimahat Bille Mohamed, convicted in the rape of a 15-year-old, who is now charged with kidnapping and raping a woman while on probation; Moriarty says the loss of critical witnesses weakened that case. The same year, it did not charge a man accused of keying six Teslas, sending him to diversion to secure restitution and, Moriarty said, because "a felony conviction destabilizes their lives" and makes new crimes likelier. Daily Signal host Tony Kinnett set that case beside the O'Keefe charges. Moriarty says her office makes decisions "without regard for the political consequences," and that the election case matters because "you just cannot come into a polling place and misrepresent yourself using some other voter's identity." Each case is covered in detail below.
What the videos show
O'Keefe's group posted an 11-minute video on August 13, and Higby posted his own on YouTube. Before going in, Higby tells his viewers: "I'm not actually going to vote, not going to touch any ballots, but I'm going to see if they will give me the ballots of random people who are actually registered to vote, real people, and see if they'll just hand me those ballots." At one polling place, O'Keefe, wearing a thobe and speaking in an accent, tells the check-in judge "the name is" William Pomeranz, is asked, "And does that look correct?" and then asks whether he can vouch for unregistered friends. The judge says he can vouch for up to eight people. At one stop a worker tells him, "Well, you're the ID"; the two videos place that exchange at different stops. Each time, O'Keefe leaves before signing anything, saying he will go get the people he wants to vouch for.
Higby, in a niqab, gives names that are not his at two stops. Asked at the first whether he wants to vote first, he says "Yes," and is told a voter already on the rolls can vote without ID; at the second he tells a worker, "And no ID, I vote Kami," and the worker answers, "Correct."
The poll workers did not all say the same thing. At Higby's first stop, a worker told him the woman he wanted to vouch for "will need ID," and that "without any form of ID, photo ID, then she wouldn't be able to register." At a later stop, a worker said no ID was needed for the people he would vouch for, then explained the oath: "you are signing an oath, a legal oath that you know them and you know that they live in this area." Asked whether anyone checks, the worker said, "After the fact, yeah." O'Keefe's group says some workers "became suspicious of the group" and "communicated concerns about the team over their radios," AP reported, and the Secretary of State's office says poll workers reported the visits immediately. Higby ends his video: "I didn't touch any ballots. I didn't touch any documents," and "It wasn't to break the law. It wasn't to commit voter fraud."
Neither video shows the men telling poll workers who they were or what they were doing; the explanations are made to the camera. In Higby's version of one of O'Keefe's stops, a worker begins, "And verify to make sure you want to go ahead and," and O'Keefe cuts in: "I'm going to go get the others and I'll come right back." That fits Moriarty's account that "they made excuses to leave as soon as the election judge asked them to sign the oath." Her other claim, that the videos "kept out the part that they did not sign the oath," which she made while saying "I haven't seen all the videos," is not borne out. Higby's video includes a worker explaining the oath, O'Keefe's narration describes it, and Higby tells viewers, "They might have had me sign an affidavit, but nobody's going to check those affidavits."
Moriarty also said the videos were deceptively edited, CNN reported, and Secretary of State Steve Simon called the posted footage "heavily edited." O'Keefe has since posted what he calls "the whole thing, start to finish," according to the Daily Caller, and Daily Signal host Tony Kinnett said that in Higby's footage he saw "no jump cuts." Moriarty said the case did not depend on the videos, because election judges at each precinct documented the visits and police interviewed them. Her office learned of the visits from the Secretary of State's office, she said, and it also represents the county's elections director, a dual role state law gives every Minnesota county attorney, who both advises county officers and prosecutes felonies.
The legal question
Minnesota law makes it a felony to "intentionally ... misrepresent the individual's identity in applying for a ballot." The case turns on when "applying" begins. Moriarty says it starts at the check-in table: "When you walk in and you say to the election judge, I am so-and-so and you are not that person and I am here to vouch, that is part of the application process." The election code gives each side something. It calls the person at the table an "applicant" before any signature, letting a judge confirm "the applicant's name, address, and date of birth" before "the applicant signs the roster." It also says a ballot is handed over only after the roster is signed, in exchange for a receipt, a step neither man reached. Asked at her news conference whether the statute was ambiguous, Moriarty said, "They did begin to apply. I mean, that's clear." O'Keefe says, "We didn't apply for a ballot; we were there talking to election clerks, posing hypotheticals." A court will decide.
According to the charges, as reported by CBS Minnesota, the two men visited three polling places (IBTimes put the number at four) and gave election judges the names of real registered voters at their real addresses. O'Keefe's group said in a statement reported by KSTP that it "did not impersonate anyone" and "stated a name and asked election workers questions about Minnesota's vouching process." Pomeranz told CBS Minnesota that learning his identity had been misrepresented "was pretty much a shock," and that he voted that evening "without a problem" and credited the poll workers for reporting the visit. Moriarty said some of the names belonged to people who had died; asked where the names came from, she said, "We don't know that." Each count carries up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, ABC News reported, but Moriarty said at her news conference that she expected "presumptive probation under the Minnesota sentencing guidelines. So no, they wouldn't be going to prison," though they "could do some local jail time." She called it "a low-level offense in terms of Minnesota felonies." State court records show these election charges have been used once since 2021, MPR News reported.
Journalism or impersonation
O'Keefe and Higby say they were testing Minnesota's vouching law, which lets a registered voter vouch for the residence of up to eight people registering on Election Day in the same precinct. In August, O'Keefe's group said the investigation "was intended to test the limits of Minnesota's vouching law and document how election workers apply it on Election Day." Higby told WCCO, "I never voted, I never signed an affidavit, and I never violated a law," and wrote on X: "This is lawfare. They want to scare all independent journalists who may challenge them." Moriarty said the case "is not meant to send a message. It's meant for these particular people to understand that what they did was unlawful," CNN reported. In his written response to the charges, O'Keefe said his team trained its reporters to say "the name is" rather than "my name is," and argued that "Moriarty is wrong as a matter of constitutional law. The 1st Amendment allows reporters to show up on Election Day and ask questions at polling booths."
O'Keefe also points to a 2012 comparison. After a man working with him gave Attorney General Eric Holder's name at a Washington, D.C., polling place and was offered Holder's ballot, Holder told the House Judiciary Committee that "that guy was very careful not to say he was Eric Holder, not to actually get a ballot. He didn't do the kinds of things that would have subjected him to criminal prosecution." Holder was describing that video, not Minnesota law, which bars misrepresenting one's identity "in applying for a ballot." O'Keefe says his team "clearly stopped and walked out of the polling places to avoid even touching a voting ballot."
Moriarty's answer is that a polling place has different rules. "If you identify as a journalist, there is no such thing as undercover investigation in the polling place," she said, according to Breitbart. "You have to identify yourself as a journalist in the polling place, which they did not do." She said the theatrics were not the crime, MPR News reported: "It is not against the law to be performative. It is not against the law to be offensive." Hamline University law professor David Schultz said in August that "it's illegal in the state of Minnesota to impersonate another voter, and this is apparently what O'Keefe did."
Mike Davis, founder of the conservative legal group Article III Project, argued the opposite in a Fox News opinion piece: what the two did "was vintage investigative journalism, not voter fraud," and "the First Amendment guarantees a free press to protect this precise kind of work." Will Chamberlain, the group's senior counsel, wrote that the pair "revealed how easy it is to commit fraud in your system – without actually defrauding anyone."
Davis also says Moriarty applies the law selectively. He points to the alleged April assault on Turning Point USA reporter Savanah Hernandez at an anti-ICE protest outside the Whipple federal building. Moriarty's office filed one fifth-degree assault charge, a misdemeanor under Minnesota law, against one of the three people involved, and a spokesperson said it found "insufficient evidence" to charge three other people it reviewed; a federal grand jury indicted all three, Fox 9 reported. Two of the three said in a TV interview that they were defending themselves and their family, and Hernandez says none of the video shows her as the aggressor. Davis urged the Justice Department to open "a civil rights criminal case against Moriarty and others"; the department has not said what its own review of the O'Keefe case could lead to.
O'Keefe's undercover work has drawn legal trouble before. In 2010 he pleaded guilty in Louisiana to a misdemeanor charge of entering federal property under false pretenses after posing as a telephone repairman, ABC News reported. In 2024 he and Project Veritas said they were not aware of any evidence of election fraud at an Erie, Pennsylvania, post office after a postmaster's defamation lawsuit over their 2020 videos was settled, CBS Minnesota reported, and the Project Veritas board fired him in 2023, CNN reported. O'Keefe says that in the Louisiana case "they falsely accused me of a felony and later admitted there was no felony," and he notes that he won a reversal in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a challenge to Oregon's recording law.
Vouching and the noncitizen question
O'Keefe's August post on X said poll workers told them they "Can Vouch for Eight Unregistered Voters Without ID." "And no ID needed. I just vouch for them," O'Keefe says in one of the videos, and a poll worker replies, "Well you're the ID," according to Alpha News. The Secretary of State's office has told Alpha News that vouching only proves where a new registrant lives, and that the registrant "must still provide their Minnesota driver's license or ID card number, or the last four digits of their social security number."
State election officials say the episode shows the safeguards working: poll workers documented the visits and reported them, and Secretary of State Steve Simon has said they did what they were supposed to do, MPR News reported. KSTP reported that the group apparently left after being told a voucher must sign an oath, which is made under penalty of perjury. Simon says 0.6 percent of Minnesota voters were vouched for in 2024 and that he does not recall a case of vouching fraud during his tenure, an assessment by the office that runs the system. The law has federal critics: in January the Justice Department demanded Minnesota's vouching records, and Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon wrote that the law "seems facially inconsistent with the Help America Vote Act of 2002," KSTP reported. KSTP added that nothing has since been done by the Justice Department, and that an earlier federal lawsuit against Minnesota over voter registration was dismissed.
Minnesota is one of 14 states, plus Washington, D.C., where voters can cast a ballot without showing ID, AP reported, citing the National Conference of State Legislatures. Higby's video goes a step further, arguing that a noncitizen could do the same because in Minnesota "driver's licenses are issued to anyone regardless of their immigration status or their citizenship." Since October 2023, under the state's Driver's Licenses for All law, residents can get a standard license regardless of immigration status. No one in the videos tested a noncitizen's registration. People registering at the polls sign an oath that they are citizens, as a poll worker explains in Higby's video, and the state checks Election Day registrations against its records after each election. A 2024 Star Tribune opinion column, citing Virgil Wiebe's study of every Minnesota prosecution since 2015, said it found three noncitizen-voting convictions among more than 13.4 million votes, including a 2018 case in which "the poll worker incorrectly told him he could vote." O'Keefe's video makes the counterargument: when ineligible voters are found only after an election, the results "will have already been announced and enacted."
The office's other decisions
Abdimahat Bille Mohamed was charged with first-degree criminal sexual conduct in a 2024 assault, and was charged separately in the 2017 rape of a 15-year-old girl. Under a plea deal, prosecutors replaced the 2024 charge with a less serious fifth-degree count, and he pleaded guilty in April 2025 to felony criminal sexual conduct in both cases. In May he was sentenced to five years of probation for the rape of the 15-year-old and a stayed 14-month sentence in the other case, with no prison time, and the office agreed not to charge him in a 2018 assault he was suspected of, MPR News and the Star Tribune reported. Moriarty has said the loss of critical witnesses weakened the case.
In September 2025, while on probation, Mohamed allegedly held a Mankato woman captive in a Bloomington hotel for six days and repeatedly raped her. Moriarty's office charged him in that case in early December, and days later federal prosecutors charged him with two counts of kidnapping, one for the Mankato woman and one for the 2017 abduction of the 15-year-old. He faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years if convicted, and prosecutors say DNA evidence links him to most of the assaults. A Profoundd search of news coverage on October 31 found no report of a plea or trial in the federal case.
Moriarty said her office "overcame the loss of critical witnesses to secure felony convictions," but "because our case was substantially weakened, we could not get the prison sentence we wanted," the Star Tribune reported. Mohamed's lawyer in that deal, Thomas Beito, told the paper that "the prosecution did not give us anything out of the goodness of their hearts," citing "serious problems with the credibility" of the teenage victim and a video he said showed the 2024 encounter was consensual. Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, announcing the federal charges in December 2025, blamed Minnesota's "left-wing soft-on-crime policies." Moriarty called the Justice Department's statement "a clear attempt to politicize a sexual assault prosecution to inflict further harm on our entire Somali community." Moriarty is not seeking reelection and leaves office in January.
In April 2025, Minneapolis police arrested a 33-year-old state employee accused of using a key to scratch and write on six Teslas downtown, causing about $20,000 in damage. Moriarty's office did not charge him and sent him to pre-charge diversion with restitution to the owners, saying the approach "helps to ensure the individual keeps their job and can pay restitution, as well as reducing the likelihood of repeat offenses," and that charges remained possible if the vandalism continued. "We did not decline it," Moriarty said in remarks aired by the Daily Signal. She told reporters that "if they go through the traditional system, and they have a felony conviction on their record, they are much more likely to come back and commit a new crime," adding that "for most property offenders, without a record, they go to diversion."
Police Chief Brian O'Hara said his department "did its job," and Anoka County Attorney Brad Johnson said his office would have brought charges, Fox 9 reported; the man's lawyer said his client "is very remorseful for his actions." O'Keefe has a 2010 misdemeanor conviction, described above; no report Profoundd found on October 31 says whether the office considered diversion for him or Higby.
Critics also cite murder cases. In 2011, Kemen Taylor, then 25, drove two teenagers who opened fire on three boys riding bikes in north Minneapolis, killing 13-year-old Ray'Jon Gomez; prosecutors said the boys were not the intended targets. The shooters pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received 34 years each; Taylor rejected a plea deal, was convicted of first-degree murder at trial and received a mandatory sentence of life without parole. Under a 2023 state law that lets prosecutors seek sentence reductions for "substantial and compelling reasons," Moriarty's office this year called his sentence "a miscarriage of justice" and petitioned for 26 years, which could free him within several years. The petition argues Taylor was punished at trial for turning down the plea deal and is no longer a danger to the public, MPR News reported. A spokesperson said that if the 13-year offer was appropriate to protect the public and hold Taylor accountable, then "life without parole is by definition a disparity requiring correction." Judge Shereen Askalani took the petition under advisement in September; a Profoundd search of news coverage on October 31 found no ruling.
Gomez's father, Kevin Funchie, called the petition "sickening," the Star Tribune reported. Both candidates to succeed Moriarty object: former acting U.S. Attorney Anders Folk called it "a slap in the face to the victim and his family," and DFL state Rep. Cedrick Frazier, who co-sponsored the 2023 law, said "this is not the way this statute was intended to be used." The county says it has recommended relief in fewer than 10 of roughly 650 applications for review or sentence adjustment.
It is not the first such dispute. In 2023 Moriarty offered two brothers, 15 and 17, charged with second-degree murder in the killing of 23-year-old Zaria McKeever, plea deals of 18 to 24 months in a juvenile facility in exchange for testifying against Erick Haynes, the ex-boyfriend accused of ordering the killing; Gov. Tim Walz handed the case to Attorney General Keith Ellison after criticism from McKeever's family, Ellison and the state's largest police union. Moriarty, a former chief public defender elected in 2022, said: "Our goal is to treat kids like kids." Families of victims and prosecutors in her own office have criticized other plea offers she made in violent cases since.
In August, Marquez Hill-Turnipseed pleaded guilty under a deal with her office to second-degree murder in two drive-by killings three years apart, one of them a bystander shot at Boom Island Park in 2025, and agreed to two 40-year sentences served at the same time, Fox 9 reported. The victims' relatives objected to the two murders being treated as one. The office said "the number of years any defendant is sentenced to serve has never and will never reflect the value of the person whose life they took" and that he "will be removed for decades from the community he harmed," according to the Daily Mail.
What happens next
O'Keefe and Higby are due in Hennepin County District Court on November 16. Voters choose Moriarty's successor, Folk or Frazier, on November 3, and the new county attorney takes office in January.
Questions this story could not answer from the public record: whether the office considered diversion for either man; how the one other case brought under this election law since 2021 was resolved; which step delayed the charges when the first news conference was called off; whether the elections officials the office represents sought charges; and where O'Keefe and Higby got the voters' names and addresses.
Profoundd's read
Analysis, based on the sourced facts above. The videos and the prosecutor agree that neither man signed an oath, took a ballot or meant to vote, and the real voter whose name O'Keefe gave voted that evening. The videos do not support a claim that the men told poll workers what they were doing: they gave names that were not theirs, which Moriarty says included dead people's, and left saying they would bring back others. Higby's own words also complicate "we didn't apply": he set out to see whether workers would hand him real voters' ballots, and told one, "I vote Kami."
The case turns on whether giving a false name at the check-in table is already "applying for a ballot." The statute gives each side something to argue, and a court will decide. The videos' larger point is accurate as a description of the law: Minnesota, like 13 other states and Washington, D.C., does not ask registered voters for ID, and relies on oaths and checks after the election. Moriarty says the judges' request for the oath, and the men's departure, show that system working; whether it is a weakness is the policy argument the videos were made to start.
The comparison with the office's other cases is about priorities. The office says it could not get prison for Mohamed because critical witnesses were lost, and his own lawyer also pointed to weaknesses in the state's case, for different reasons. It diverted a man accused of keying six Teslas to secure restitution and because, it says, a felony record makes new crimes likelier. It chose two felony counts each for two men whose conduct, by its own account, put no ballot in anyone's hands, and it calls the offense low-level and likely to bring probation. Each decision has a stated reason, and the cases are not legally alike: one was a plea shaped by evidence problems, one a first-time property case, and one an election offense the office says it treats seriously because it uses real voters' identities. The office also filed one misdemeanor in the alleged assault on a conservative reporter, citing insufficient evidence against others, while a federal grand jury indicted all three people involved.
A court will decide whether the law reaches what the two men did. Whether the office treated them as it treats others is a separate question, and a court's silence would not answer it: under the Supreme Court's 1985 Wayte decision, a selective-prosecution claim must show both a discriminatory effect and that the government charged someone "because of" protected activity, a bar set high to protect prosecutors' discretion whether or not it was abused. That question rests on records like these, and on the voters choosing Moriarty's successor on November 3.
This article reflects reporting through Saturday morning, October 31, 2026. Sources: O'Keefe Media Group video, August 13; Cam Higby video, August; Hennepin County Attorney's news conference, video via USA Today, October 28; Hennepin County Attorney's Office, October 28; Minn. Stat. 204C.14; Minn. Stat. 204C.10; Minn. Stat. 388.051; Wayte v. United States, 1985; MPR News, August 14; Minnesota Secretary of State, August 14; MPR News, October 28; CBS Minnesota, October 28; NBC News, October 28; KSTP, October 28; Fox 9, October 29; IBTimes; AP, October 28; Breitbart, October 28; Daily Caller, October 30; Hot Air, October 29; The Daily Signal, Tony Kinnett; MPR News, December 5, 2025; Star Tribune, December 6, 2025; MPR News, April 24, 2025; Fox 9, April 23, 2025; Fox 9, April 23, 2025; Star Tribune opinion, July 14, 2024; House Judiciary Committee hearing record, June 7, 2012; Fox 9, April 29; CNN, October 28; ABC News, October 28; Alpha News, October 28; O'Keefe Media Group, October 28; Fox News opinion, Mike Davis, October 30; Fox 9, September 20; Fox 9, August 20; Daily Mail, August 22; MPR News, September 22; Wikipedia's article on Mary Moriarty.
