As bad as Arizona may be, there’s a reason that Philly still leads the nation in fraud in contested statewide elections. (I’m not going to bother mentioning New York or Los Angeles, where Karen Bass was predictably appointed mayor by way of a whole lot of late-arriving ballots for the second time.)
What’s remarkable is not that things like this happen in Philly, but how unremarkable they are.
Pennsylvania governor-elect Josh Shapiro, who rose to prominence by downplaying Republican claims of voter fraud, charged one of his former campaign consultants on Wednesday with “wide-scale” forgery of voter ballots.
Shapiro, in his capacity as Pennsylvania attorney general, alleges that Philadelphia political consultant Rasheen Crews duplicated more than 1,000 signatures on petitions to add his clients to Democratic primary ballots for Philadelphia city elections in 2019.
“By soliciting and organizing the wide-scale forgery of signatures, the defendant undermined the democratic process and Philadelphians’ right to a free and fair election,” Shapiro said in a statement announcing the charges.
One person hired by Crews Consulting told investigators that Crews had instructed her to go to a hotel near the Philadelphia International Airport, where she and other workers wrote signatures based on names from “street lists” that Crews had provided.
Several other workers shared similar experiences, explaining that they had been told about opportunities to earn money — in at least one case, $10 an hour, prosecutors said.
A handwriting analysis of 2,596 signatures found that 1,194 had been photocopied, according to a criminal complaint. Additionally, multiple lines of signatures showed a strong probability that the petition pages had not been independently prepared, but were completed by “multiple groupings of common writers.”
A review of a business account tied to Crews Consulting found checks from clients totaling more than $12,000 in January and February 2019, investigators said. One of the candidates who hired Crews Consulting had agreed to pay a rate of $2 per signature.
In ’86, Councilman Lee Beloff, the son of a judge, was charged alongside his legislative aide, and mob boss “Little Nicky” Scarfo, with extorting $1 million and an apartment for his mistress.
Less glamorously, Beloff was also indicted, along with his wife and two Democratic committee members for ” conspiracy, voting more than once and giving false information on voter registrations to elderly people living in a nursing home.”
Beloff had previously received a gubernatorial pardon for interfering with a poll watcher so he could run for public office.
After serving 6 years of his 10 year sentence, Beloff got out and became a Democrat ward chairman.
“We stay loyal to our people,” a local Democratic ward leader said.
A photo last year from the Philly Public Record shows a meeting of the “combined 39th Ward Democratic organizations”.
One of the photos is titled, “A South Philly Classic” and features Lee Beloff and Ozzie Myers.
Ozzie Meyers, a former Democrat Congressman who had been convicted of bribery and conspiracy, and spent three years in prison in the Abscam scandal, was indicted again this year for “conspiring to violate voting rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections, bribery of an election official, falsification of records, voting more than once in federal elections.”
What’s striking about these stories is the sheer level of chutzpah, the brazenness of the corruption in question. That’s a fundamental characteristic of the kind of hard-core corruption in the urban Dem political machine.
Mind blowing! Maybe a right-aligned mafia needs to counter the leftist job’s illegal election tampering ! Seems that Gotham would be a good comparison to PA!
Is there ever a right aligned mafia? There are RINO cheaters, liars, and grifters, for sure, but RINOS are not “right” aligned at all. We the people can be viewed as suckers, because we follow laws that only seem to apply to us.
Democrats and RINOS= The “Crimes-R-Us” gang.
Yeah, the old system we had in California, before the mail-in scam started, was much better for checking signatures. Everyone came down to the neighborhood polling place on election day, and the poll workers, who were paid volunteers from the neighborhood (mostly little old ladies who knew most everyone already) would check off your signature against the signature they already had on paper in their big signature/address/name book.
The massive fraud against each other in the primaries is all focused against the GOP in the general election. The only fraud that ever gets prosecuted is the fraud against each other.
When we moved into a new home and met our new neighbors, little did we know that the sweet old lady on the hill was very much involved in local voting! The first election after we moved I went to vote and lo and behold, there was my sweet old neighbor checking people in to vote! I approached her and said hello, she asked how we were doing, and the “May I see your ID please”!! I GLADLY handed over my Driver’s License – she looked at it – looked at me – and said “yes, that’s you” and then I voted! This went on for two more elections before she retired. THAT was how it SHOULD BE!! EVERYWHERE!! But we know that Our Nation would look entirely different – more INNOCENT people would be ALIVE – more US Citizens would be in GOOD PAYING JOBS – grocery shelves would be fully stocked – filling up your GASOLINE POWERED CAR would not require a 2nd mortgage – and a FIRST mortgage payment would be more affordable! When you face crime and dissension, THANK A DEMOcrat!
My wife works the polls and she knows many of the voters who come in person; so do others that she works with on election day. NUTS to write in ballots.
I went to vote and was told that I had already voted! My son has the same name as me except for the middle initial. Fortunately the registrar had a son the same age as mine and they hung out together as teens. I asked if he had voted and the registrar said “yes”. The wrong name had been checked off by human error. I was allowed to vote and my son’s name was checked off for me.
Philadelphia like most if not all big cities is a one party cesspool of political corruption
The main driver of this ballot fraud scourge is that there is no punishment for it that equals the crime. The DOJ & FBI are not interested. State and local authorities are corrupt or are totally imcompetent in their jobs monitoring election procedures and practices. In the case of Philly, total corruption with impunity is the disease.
If, and it is a big if, this ever got to court, the legal clowns would say “Would 1124 votes make any difference?” the answer would be “no it makes no difference to the result”. The fact that there is a 99% likelihood that this is the tip of the ice berg is then ignored.
Philadelphia is the city of brotherly handwriting that is off the wall.