O'Keefe, Higby to appear in court Nov. 16 over Minnesota election charges

Prosecutor’s office says videos aimed to ‘sow doubt’ about Minnesota voting

James O’Keefe and Cam Higby were issued summons and were not in police custody, officials said, and are to appear in court on Nov. 16. O’Keefe stated he was facing felony charges for “exposing fraud in Minnesota.” “This is not political,” he said in a statement. “It is fundamental. It is about whether citizens still have the right to question their government.”

Higby reposted clips from the video of them visiting the polling precincts, calling the charges against him “lawfare.” “I am not afraid of Minnesota,” he said on X.

The charges were announced by Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty at a press conference Wednesday. Moriarty said conservative activist James O’Keefe, 42, and 26-year-old Cam Higby, a political commentator, were charged with unlawful voting and identity theft, both felony offenses, for giving election judges the names of registered voters without the individuals’ consent.

“Free and fair elections are the bedrock of democracy, and their protection is one of our highest priorities,” Moriarty said.

The charges stem from Aug. 11, the date of the Minnesota primary election, when the two men, dressed in traditional Muslim garb — including Higby in a burqa — visited several precincts for a video they were shooting concerning a Minnesota law that allows people to register to vote on the day of the election.

Minnesota’s decades-old voter-vouching law permits a registered voter to vouch for the residence of up to eight other people in their precinct in order to allow eligible voters to register on Election Day without conventional proof of address. The registered voter must sign an oath confirming that the applicant resides in the precinct.

In a statement published with the video in August, O’Keefe said he went “undercover” at polling places in Minneapolis as Muslims and “presented an intentionally extreme scenario to expose the sheer lunacy of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system.” “We documented workers explaining how Minnesota’s vouching process could be used to establish residency for people registering at the polls without standard identification,” he said.

In the video, O’Keefe speaks with an accent and presents himself under names not his own when asking the election officials about the vouching program.

Moriarty said O’Keefe and Higby identified themselves using names of registered voters without those voters’ knowledge or permission and stopped short of signing the voter registration oath. She accused the men of having entered polling places without legitimate purposes and intentionally misrepresenting their identities to election judges in applying for a ballot. Her office said the purpose of the videos and posting them online was to “sow doubt about Minnesota’s secure voting systems.”

Moriarty explained that the vouching law, which accounted for less than 0.6% of votes cast in the 2024 general election, is most commonly used in senior living facilities by residents who have not updated their driver’s license to reflect their current address. “Minnesota law states clearly that no individual shall intentionally misrepresent their identity in applying for a ballot,” she said.

Moriarty told reporters that the election judges at all the precincts the men had visited noted “this strange behavior.” The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office was notified of the situation by the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office, and the charges followed an investigation and a review.

She said they would have been able to charge the men even without them having published video of their interactions with the election officials online. “We know that they gave the names of registered voters without their permission,” she said. “So, yes, we would have been able to go forward without their video.”

Where the men allegedly obtained the names of the registered voters was unknown, she said, adding that they have interviewed those people. “Some were deceased, but others were alive and did not have any idea how these people got their information and certainly did not consent to them using their identity,” she said.

O’Keefe has had numerous run-ins with the law stemming from his political activism, including pleading guilty in 2010 to a federal misdemeanor charge of entering government property under false pretenses, stemming from an operation where he tried to show a Democratic senator was avoiding calls from constituents opposed to President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms.