Feds join vote fraud case

INDIANAPOLIS - A joint federal-state-local task force investigating vote fraud and public corruption in Lake County has identified more than 100 targets it may seek to indict, a prosecutor said Thursday.\nFederal prosecutors will join a 13-member task force of deputy state attorneys general and Lake County prosecutors in an investigation that began four months ago, Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter and Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter announced at a Statehouse news conference. They had been joined by U.S. Attorney Joseph Van Bokkelen at an earlier news conference in Lowell in the northwest Indiana county.\nA state grand jury so far has returned four indictments, but its work remains in its early stages, Bernard Carter said.\n"We have not even gotten to the core of what we believe exists in my county," the prosecutor said. "We feel very comfortable on the status of the investigation. There's in excess of a hundred potential targets of our investigation."\nNeither he nor the attorney general would discuss the identities of the potential targets or the nature of the evidence that investigators are gathering against them.\nThe addition of federal prosecutors and agents of the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies brings greater resources to the state-local effort and possibly close coordination with an ongoing federal investigation of Lake County corruption. A federal grand jury so far has brought indictments against several East Chicago city officials and former Indiana Democratic Party Chairman Peter Manous in separate cases.\nEast Chicago also has been the focus of the state grand jury's work. Four months ago, it began investigating last May's Democratic primary in the city. George Pabey, who lost the mayoral nomination by 278 votes, claims he would have won if not for hundreds of fraudulent absentee votes cast for nine-term incumbent Robert Pastrick.\nThe state so far has indicted two East Chicago men and a couple charged with voting in the city when they didn't reside there. One of the East Chicago men, Allan Simmons, is accused of receiving absentee ballots for people ineligible to vote in the primary and later threatening them if they testified.\nThe state task force and grand jury also are looking at voting irregularities in Schererville, a suburban community about 15 miles southwest of Gary. Earlier this month, Town Judge Kenneth Anderson agreed to suspend court operations while the task force investigated the possibility of vote fraud in the judicial race. He was seated after a judge threw out 23 absentee ballots providing the margin of victory for incumbent Judge Deborah Riga.\nBoth grand juries will continue their work simultaneously through next month, when the state jury's term ends, Steve Carter said.\nBernard Carter, a Democrat, like most major officeholders in Lake County, said he was initially brought in the attorney general's office to assist with the local investigation because it would offer a bipartisan view of the evidence. Steve Carter is a Republican, as is Van Bokkelen.