Former acting Director of National Intelligence Ric Grenell, now a Newsmax analyst who was embedded with the Adam Laxalt campaign for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, Friday on the network called for an investigation into the actions of members of the Culinary Workers Union who went door to door during the election.
"We saw on Twitter an admission from the unions, the Culinary Union that they were going to call in their allies from Los Angeles into Las Vegas, and they went door knocking and they did ballot harvesting," Grenell said on Newsmax's "National Report," conceding that the actions are legal in Nevada.
Laxalt lost the election to incumbent Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto.
"When you go and you're the union and you knock on a union member's door, we have no idea what they say," Grenell said. "Are they saying, Give me your ballot?' Are they saying, Did you fill out your ballot? Did they say, I'm here to collect your ballot?"
The union tweeted that members reportedly canvassed at more than 1 million homes this campaign season, to try to tip the election in favor of a largely Democrat slate of candidates they support.
When asked how it would counteract the powerful union's pull in the state and its ability to turn out voters, Laxalt's campaign responded through a statement that blamed Democrats for inflation and high gas prices, reports The New York Times.
The Culinary Union represents 60,000 hospitality workers in Nevada who work at hotels and casinos in Las Vegas.
Grenell on Friday said that people may have felt intimidated by the visits, however, and said he wants an investigation to see if the ballots were opened and "somebody else filled them in."
"Or did they collect ballots that were already filled in?" said Grenell. "This is the problem that we have and when we talk about fraud in the system, mailing ballots to people recklessly through the mail. When they don't know that these ballots are coming creates a real problem."
He added that there are "stories upon stories" from his organization, Fix California of people who get unsolicited ballots, including duplicate ballots for their maiden names and their new names, and for parents who have died.
"You go to any apartment complex in California and you go to the mail room and you will see stacks of mail ballots because people don't know that they were coming,' said Grenell. "I'm all for having a system where if you can't get out of your house and you need to do an absentee ballot, you should be able to get one. But you should request it so that we know you know it's coming, and that's not the system that happens in Nevada."
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