James O’Keefe visits South Jersey to talk undercover videos and voter ID

James O’Keefe, the man behind undercover videos that helped force the group ACORN to fold and push out an NPR executive, is speaking in Medford, New Jersey, Friday night.

O’Keefe is visiting the West Jersey Tea Party to promote his new book.

This spring, O’Keefe paid a former ACORN employee in California $100,000 to settle a lawsuit tied to one of his videos, but he says he’s not backing off.

He says undercover videos have immense power and can be used to get around the mainstream media.

“People don’t believe it until they see it.  And even when they see it, they say, ‘It’s fake, it’s doctored, it’s edited,’ but they can say that all they want but then the people resign.  And they admit they say what they say,” said O’Keefe.  “In every single case, people resign or laws get changed.  So it’s not fake when people resign and laws get changed.”

These days O’Keefe is talking a lot about voter ID laws and other means to prevent voter fraud.  He says his videos prove that people could go in and vote under another person’s name, even if he has not documented cases of people actually committing such fraud.

“It’s like a bank vault door being just held open and the question you’re asking is, ‘Well are people actually going in and taking the money?’  My response is, well, the fact that the bank vault door is open, prima facie, is reason we should close the door.”

O’Keefe is a graduate of Rutgers and says he expects to do more work in the Garden State.