title:  Unlike Hillary, Cruz’s Campaign May Have ACTUALLY Just Broken The Law In Iowa
text: In Ted Cruz s last-ditch effort to scare primary voters into voting for him, he may have accidentally pushed his campaign passed the point of scummy campaigning and straight into criminal enterprise.Last week, Iowa residents woke up to find a disturbing envelope in their mailbox. Inside they found what looked to be an official document that announced that they had committed a  Voting Violation. The mailer, sent by Cruz s team,  graded  the person based on their supposed voting track record. Below their own grade, was that of several of their neighbors. It also let the recipient know that their own grade had been sent to those neighbors. The implication was clear: Your neighbors will know you committed a  voting violation  and will be ashamed of you.Pretty scummy, right?Well, it may also have been against the law.In a fiery rebuke of Cruz s pathetic ploy, Iowa s secretary of state Paul Pate released an official statement condemning the actions and strongly suggesting what Cruz s team did bordered on illegality (emphasis added).Accusing citizens of Iowa of a  voting violation  based on Iowa Caucus participation, or lack thereof , is a false representation of an official act. There is no such thing as an election violated related to frequency of voting. Any insinuation or statement to the contrary is wrong and I believe it is not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses.In more straightforward terms, what Cruz did was mislead voters into believing that they had done something wrong by intentionally posing as an official office (in this case the Public Records office). As legal analyst Dan Abram s Law Newz website points out, that s a HUGE no-no.Notice that Pate used the words  false representation of an official act  in his statement.  We looked through Iowa code, and a potential false representation is, in fact,  a violation of criminal law.  The law reads (Section 720.5)  any person who represents any document or paper to be any public record or any civil or criminal process, when the person knows such representation to be false, commits a simple misdemeanor.  (Side note: this is part of the Chapter of Iowa Law entitled Interference of Judicial Process)Obviously, faking official documents during a contentious election could be considered both unethical and possibly criminal manipulation of the democratic process. It s not clear whether Pate will go after Cruz s campaign, but what is clear is that the state of Iowa certainly has grounds to.Meanwhile, Cruz is only making matters worse for himself. While it is possible that Iowa was willing to look the other way, Cruz has since repeatedly appeared unapologetic for the pathetic campaign tactic. Following the outrage from Iowa s secretary of state and on the heels of even his own backers suggesting that this tactic was so abhorrent that they couldn t believe Cruz would do it, Cruz refused to apologize. I will apologize to no one for using every tool we can to encourage Iowa voters to come out and vote. This follows a general pattern of Republican candidates refusing to ever concede a single mistake, even when the errors are blatant and egregious.Ironically, Cruz and his fellow competition have spent countless hours blasting Hillary Clinton for her supposed criminal actions involving her emails. Despite all of this energy being poured into destroying her reputation, not a single charge has been filed against her. Her investigators can t even decide if she did anything ethically, much less criminally, wrong. So it s more than a little absurd to find that Cruz has been willfully and unapologetically breaking Iowa state law while criticizing Clinton for manufactured ones.You know what they say about people who throw stones in glass houses   they don t tend to end up in white ones.Feature image from Gage Skidmore/Flickr