Wait — Did Mitt Romney Commit Voter Fraud?

Last year, the presidential hopeful cast a ballot for Scott Brown for U.S. Senate. One problem: Romney may not have been living here at the time.

Or so says Fred Karger, a 2012 GOP presidential candidate who’s filed a complaint with state election officials, a hard copy of which I have from Karger’s office. Here’s Karger’s complaint:

Romney and his wife, Ann, bought a home in La Jolla, Calif., in 2008 for $12.5 million. A year later, they sold their $3.5 million place in Belmont and, according to Karger, took up residency, well, it’s not really clear where they took it up, except it didn’t seem to be in Massachusetts. By 2009, Mitt was sort of campaigning and sort of on his book tour. Home was wherever he finished the day. Sometimes it was in California. Sometimes, Karger says, and the National Journal bears this out, it was in New Hampshire. But it probably wasn’t in Massachusetts.

Karger reaches this conclusion because the Romneys had by that point only one residence in the Bay State, an 8,000-square-foot home that they bestowed to their son, Tagg. Now, in the Romneys’ defense, they claimed that they were Massachusetts residents because they listed the basement of Tagg’s new home as their primary address. And from that address they could vote in the commonwealth. Karger, in his complaint, says, basically, C’mon. No one’s buying that Willard.

As if to prove his point, Karger asked the congregants at the Mormon temple Romney attended, and other fine people of Belmont, when was the last time they saw good old Mitt.

The local fishmonger told Karger, “They flew the coop. They moved to California. I haven’t seen Mrs. Romney in over two years, and she used to come in here all the time.” Likewise, churchgoers used to worshiping with the Romneys told Karger that they also hadn’t seen the Romneys in a couple years. Yet the Romneys continued to vote in Massachusetts, including in the January 2010 special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. Karger says he even received personal confirmation from Ann Romney about the couple’s living arrangements. In April, Karger says he ran into her in Las Vegas at a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where Mitt was speaking. According to Karger, Ann told him they are living in California.

So it’s voter fraud if they were living in California but voting for Scott Brown in Massachusetts. In my (very) brief conversation with a spokesman for Bill Galvin, the Massachusetts Secretary of State, whose office oversees elections, the spokesman said Karger’s complaint was more of a letter “asking for an investigation.” No word yet on if such an investigation will happen. A spokesman for Romney wasn’t immediately available for comment.

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