A Massachusetts voter was fuming after she says her polling location was shut down to accommodate a visit by Bill Clinton on Tuesday.
Angela Grace posted cell phone video showing orange barrels and yellow police line tape at what she says was a New Bedford voting location.
“I haven’t seen one person be able to come in and be able to vote in here. Everything is blocked off. No person can park here.
“They are affecting the voting at this poll. It’s ridiculous. It’s fraud and illegal,” she declared while panning the camera across the scene showing the media and police milling about while dozens of observers are cordoned off.
“From one side of the street to the other, there’s no way anybody can get down here to vote.”
She laid the blame at the feet of the New Bedford mayor, Jon F. Mitchell.
“Mayor of New Bedford, MA campaigning for Hillary and blocking this voting poll!!! No one has come here to vote in the 2 hours I’ve been here by the door!!” she wrote in the video description.
Another video, posted by WFHN, shows Mitchell speaking into a bull horn after Bill Clinton addressed the crowd for several minutes.
Mitchell proceeded to campaign for Hillary Clinton outside the polling location, telling the crowd she spent some of her “formative years just a few blocks from here.”
“Let’s do our part to get her over the hump now,” he said.
Clinton and Mitchell appeared to be in violation of a Massachusetts state law that bars electioneering within a certain distance of a polling location.
Via the National Association of Secretaries of State, Massachusetts law reads:
Within 150 feet of a polling place…no person shall solicit votes for or against, or otherwise promote or oppose, any person or political party or position on a ballot question, to be voted on at the current election. No campaign material intended to influence the vote of a voter in the ongoing election, including campaign literature, buttons, signs, and ballot stickers, may be posted, exhibited, circulated, or distributed in the polling place, in the building where it is located, on the building walls, on the premises where the building stands, or within 150 feet of an entrance door to the building. ( 950 CMR 53.03(18); 54.04.22)
The video appears to show the duo well within 150 feet of the building.
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