Activists who posed as Minnesota voters during primary could be in legal trouble

An undercover video could land a handful of activists in legal trouble. They pretended to be Minnesota voters during the primary.

Members of a group once known as Project Veritas say they were testing Minnesota's 53-year-old voter voucher law, but in videos now seen more than 7 million times, they may have broken the law instead.

The video begins with members of the Florida group, now calling themselves Citizen Justice League, in what they called Muslim costumes, using fake accents and claiming to be Minnesota voters vouching for the others.

Minnesota's voucher law is intended to help people who just moved to the state vote. It allows a registered voter to vouch that someone lives where they say they do. The law does not allow people to impersonate real Minnesota voters.

A man in the video falsely identified them to election officials as William Pomeranz. CBS News Minnesota spoke to the real William Pomeranz, who, on Election Day, kept getting odd messages.

"I actually had a student contact me that had showed me what was online about my identity being misrepresented. So, that was pretty much a shock. I found out on Friday," Pomeranz said.

The group's members did not go ahead with voting illegally.

"Kudos to the poll workers. They reported it afterwards, and frankly, I got to vote that evening without a problem. So, you know, the voting process, in my mind, worked," Pomeranz said.

The man in the video who falsely identified himself as William Pomeranz, whose real name is James O'Keefe, may have put himself in legal jeopardy.

"It's illegal in the state of Minnesota to impersonate another voter, and this is apparently what O'Keefe did," said David Schultz, a constitutional law professor at Hamline University.

Schultz, Pomeranz and Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon say the video shows the system worked.

"As I read the law, you can't impersonate another registered voter, and that's exactly what they appear to have filmed themselves doing," Simon said.

Impersonating a Minnesota voter at a polling place is a felony punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison and a fine of up to $20,000.

Project Veritas is a conservative activist group built on secretly recorded videos targeting news outlets, unions and Democratic-aligned groups, often edited in ways critics argue strips context from what its subjects said. Its founder, James O'Keefe, was ousted from the organization's leadership in 2023 amid allegations of financial misconduct.

CBS News Minnesota reached out to Project Veritas and the Citizen Justice League and was waiting to hear back.