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Salon
Salon
Politics
Alex Galbraith

Indiana man arrested for ballot theft

An Indiana Republican who unsuccessfully ran for Congress was arrested earlier this week over allegations that he stole sample ballots during a voting machine test. 

Police allege that 51-year-old Larry Savage swiped several ballots during a test of the Madison County, Indiana voting machines on October 3. They claim that surveillance footage shows Savage stuffing several of the test ballots into his pockets. 

Test ballots in Indiana are marked as such, but can still be read by voting machines and used to cast a real vote. Indiana requires that the test ballots be destroyed after using them to test voting machines. In a video shared to Facebook of Savage turning himself in on Tuesday, he said that the "truth's gonna come out."

"I guess this is what they do to political opponents," said Savage, who received less than two percent of the vote in his Republican primary. 

He is facing a felony charge of destroying or misplacing a ballot and a misdemeanor charge of theft.

While Savage hasn't been found guilty, and any intentions with the supposedly swiped ballots are unclear, his story is seemingly part of a larger wave of destruction of ballots as the election nears.

Ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington were set ablaze earlier this week. Local authorities hundreds of ballots were destroyed between the two boxes in Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon. That fire followed the intentional burning of several ballots in Arizona in an apparent arson

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