Contrary to what Democrats and their media allies will tell you, voting and elections fraud is still alive in America, and still a reason why we have systems of voter registration and election security. No, really large-scale frauds aren’t common anymore, as they were until the FBI pioneered computer analysis to bust the notorious Chicago voter-fraud machine that produced 100,000 fraudulent votes in the 1982 Illinois governor’s race. No, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and there is no evidence that elections decided by many thousands of votes are rigged. But frauds can and do happen, they do affect the outcomes of elections, and the smaller-scale the fraud, the harder they are to detect. There are convictions every year for voting and election fraud, and periodic examples of elections thrown out in court. In March, 2021, a Mississippi Democratic primary election was invalidated for absentee ballot fraud.
Other recent examples:
June, 2022: “A southern Arizona woman was sentenced Monday to three years of supervised probation for illegally casting the early ballot of her deceased mother during the November 2020 general election…In another Arizona case, a Scottsdale woman was sentenced to probation in April for voting her deceased mother’s ballot in the November 2020 elections…Also this year, a 70-year-old Lake Havasu City woman was sentenced to one year of supervised probation for voting with her dead father’s name in the 2018 election.”
June 2022: “An upstate New York Republican is being forced out of her city council post after pleading guilty to three federal counts of voter fraud…Troy City Councilmember Kimberly McPherson…admitted to fraudulently casting an absentee ballot in last year’s primary election and two such ballots in the general election. McPherson’s name appeared on both ballots. She admitted to illegally filing absentee ballots in the names of two other voters.”
April, 2022: A Florida investigation charged ten felons for casting illegal votes in 2020, as a result of a voter-registration drive among felons.
April, 2022: Two Florida men in The Villages pleaded guilty to voting in multiple states in 2020.
February, 2022: Pamela Moses, a Black Lives Matter activist and onetime Democratic mayoral candidate in Memphis who had “an extensive record of felony convictions,” was convicted of voter fraud for voting while still on probation, and sentenced to six years in prison.
October, 2021: A Clark County, Nevada man was charged with voting in his dead wife’s name.
September, 2021: A Chester County, Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to casting a ballot in his son’s name (the father is a registered Republican, his son a registered Democrat). The fraud was spotted by an alert poll worker who collected a reward offered by Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.
May, 2021: A Delaware County, Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to casting an illegal vote for Donald Trump in the name of his dead mother.
Now, we have the latest: on Monday, Michael “Ozzie” Myers, a longtime machine Democrat in Philadelphia whose track record of corruption goes back so far he was expelled from Congress in 1980 over Abscam, pleaded guilty to federal charges of bribing election judges in South Philly “for specific Democratic candidates in the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Pennsylvania elections.” Each of the two election-fraud schemes to which he pleaded guilty involved a co-conspirator elections judge who had previously pleaded guilty. The first scheme:
Myers admitted in court to bribing the Judge of Elections for the 39th Ward, 36th Division in South Philadelphia, Domenick J. Demuro, in a fraudulent scheme over several years. Demuro, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in May 2020, was responsible for overseeing the entire election process and all voter activities of his Division in accord with federal and state election laws. The voting machines at each polling station, including in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, generate records in the form of a printed receipt documenting the use of each voting machine. This printed receipt, also known as the “results receipt,” shows the vote totals, and the Judge of Elections and other Election Board Officials at each polling place attest to the accuracy of machine results.
Myers admitted to bribing Demuro to illegally add votes for certain candidates of their mutual political party in primary elections….Myers would solicit payments from his clients in the form of cash or checks as “consulting fees,” and then use portions of these funds to pay Demuro and others to tamper with election results. After receiving payments ranging from between $300 to $5,000 per election from Myers, Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machine – also known as “ringing up” votes – for Myers’ clients and preferred candidates, thereby diluting the value of ballots cast by actual voters. At Myers’ direction, Demuro would add these fraudulent votes to the totals during Election Day, and then would later falsely certify that the voting machine results were accurate. Myers is also accused of directing Demuro to lie to investigators about the circumstances of the bribes and the ballot-stuffing scheme. (Emphasis added).
The second scheme, in a different ward with a different elections judge:
Myers also admitted to conspiring to commit election fraud with a former Judge of Elections for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division in South Philadelphia, Marie Beren. Beren, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in October 2021, was the de facto Judge of Elections and effectively ran the polling places in her division by installing close associates to serve as members of the Board of Elections. Myers admitted that he gave Beren directions to add votes to candidates supported by him…Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.
During Election Day itself, Myers conferred with Beren via cell phone while she was at the polling station about the number of votes cast for his preferred candidates. Beren would report to Myers how many “legit votes,” meaning actual voters, had appeared at the polls and cast ballots. If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates. From time to time, Myers would instruct Beren to shift her efforts from one of his preferred candidates to another. Specifically, Myers would instruct Beren “to throw support” behind another candidate during Election Day if he concluded that his first choice was comfortably ahead.
Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters. After the polls closed on Election Day, Beren and her associates would falsely certify the results. (Emphasis added).
This is real, old-timey urban-machine fraud, complete with electioneering by election officials and the conspiring of those officials to falsify vote tallies. It was done at the ward level, where the numbers could be small:
When announcing the initial charges in 2020, U.S. Attorney William McSwain did not say whether the alleged vote tampering changed the outcome of any election. In 2014, McSwain said, Demuro added 27 votes to the total. In 2015, he allegedly added 40, and in 2016, he allegedly added 46. Since a relatively small number of ballots were cast at Demuro’s polling place overall, those allegedly fraudulent ballots made up 22%, 15%, and 17% of the votes, respectively. (Emphasis added).
Note that, by initiating this investigation, McSwain did more to actually protect election integrity than did Doug Mastriano, the man who defeated him in Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial primary this year.
Given that this scam was orchestrated by a five-decade veteran of Philadelphia Democratic politics and found two willing recipients, how much would you wager that this hasn’t happened in South Philadelphia in other elections?