No, Ilhan Omar and Keith Ellison Did Not Encourage Voters To ‘Vote Twice’ In 2012
Rep. Ilhan Omar, the newly sworn-in Democratic Congresswoman from Minnesota, has been the subject of a great deal of controversy in her short time in Congress, as she came under fire in for social media posts in which she implied that support for Israel in the United States is motivated by money. President Trump called on her to resign, per The Inquisitr.
There’s been much dispute over whether Omar’s statement, for which she later apologized, should be considered anti-Semitism. But now Omar has been accused of another charge, one that is indisputably baseless.
The controversial journalist and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer wrote a blog post this weekend with the headline “Ilhan Omar And Keith Ellison Caught Encouraging Voter Fraud, ‘Vote Twice.'”
The post, billed as an “exclusive,” cites “newly obtained social media posts” claiming that Omar and her predecessor in her Congressional seat, Keith Ellison, had encouraged voters to “vote twice” in an election in 2012. The “newly obtained” post is a public Instagram post, from Omar’s account, of Omar, Ellison and others at an October 2012 political rally, in which they’re among several people holding a banner that says “Be nice, VOTE NO Twice. We don’t need voter ID.”
However, the banner doesn’t mean what Loomer says it means.
Someone might want to explain to Laura Loomer that “Vote No Twice” was the 2012 slogan of the campaign to get Minnesotans to vote no on TWO different constitutional amendments.
I’d tell her, but her Twitter got shut down ?????? pic.twitter.com/JM67WULiym
— DavidGilbertPederson (@NotoriousDGP) February 24, 2019
“Be nice, vote no twice” was a slogan used by Democrats in Minnesota in 2012, on lawn signs as well as banners, in order to urge defeat of two different initiatives that were on that year’s election ballot: One to require voter ID in the state, and the other to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Minnesota Public Radio, among other local media outlets, covered it at the time.
The slogan, contrary to Loomer’s headline, was “vote no twice,” and not “vote twice.” Loomer’s post supposes that Democrats would not only be brazen enough to encourage double voting, but would carry signs advertising such a thing in public.
Both amendments were defeated that November, with Minnesota becoming the first state in the union to defeat a same-sex marriage ban at the ballot box.
Loomer’s post was picked up in other parts of the conservative media, such as by anti-Muslim blogger Pamela Geller.
Loomer and another conspiracy theorist, Jacob Wohl, visited Minnesota this weekend, in which they recorded a series of videos in which they implied they were in imminent danger from the Twin Cities area’s Muslim community. According to a tweet by journalist Tony Webster, the two visited the Al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington — the same mosque that was bombed by anti-Muslim extremists in 2017.
