Voter Fraud Found Unequivocally In Philadelphia

At a time when voter ID laws in 30 states are coming under intense
fire from the liberal media, the Obama administrations DOJ and civil rights
leaders, one of the strongest cases anywhere was offered for voter
identification by the lone Republican on the three-member panel
overseeing elections in Philadelphia.

Wednesday, City
Commissioner Al Schmidt unveiled a 27 page report that his office had
commissioned entitled “Voting Irregularities in Philadelphia County,
2012 Primary Election.” The report, which focused on cases in 15 of the
city’s 1,687 election districts, found cases of double voting, voter
impersonation, voting by non-citizens, and 23 cases of people who were
unregistered to vote but nonetheless permitted to do so.

Almost
as soon as the 40-year-old Schmidt released the report at a news
conference, his two fellow commissioners — both Democrats — denounced
its findings. Insisting that its findings did not document a problem
with voting city-wise, Commission Chairman Stephanie Singer branded the
report a “stunt.”

“I just told folks something that they would
not have heard otherwise,” Schmidt said during a
news conference.

The Republican commissioner insisted that his
report of voter irregularity in Philadelphia was not initiated to make a
case for the Keystone State’s voter ID law, which requires voters to
present a valid photo identification to receive the ballot. Democrats —
including Singer — and numerous liberal outlets have called for legal
action to thwart implementation of the law. The American Civil Liberties
Union recently filed a lawsuit, claiming that Pennsylvania’s law
violates the state constitution by depriving certain citizens of their
right to vote.

“The courts should listen and issue an injunction
that prevents the enforcement of this law before the November election,”
said an editorial from the Washington Post last week.

Schmidt, who holds a doctorate in political history and is a
performance auditor by trade, was elected to the minority spot on the
commission last fall as a reformer. Among those who backed him over the
candidate of Philadelphia’s GOP establishment was Sen. Pat Toomey
(R-Pa.). Asked if he would see that voter ID is enforced, Schmidt
replied to us without hesitation: “It’s the law. Our office will be
letting people know that it’s the law, and we will see that every vote
is counted and every vote counts in an honest election. That means to do
what we can to see that people who lack a photo ID obtain the proper
identification and can vote. And in an urban setting, that’s
impressive.”

The report by Schmidt’s office
on voter irregularities makes clear that “due to the size of the
electorate (1,029,307 registered voters in Philadelphia County) and the
volume of documentation associated with the election (3,374 Poll Books;
3,467 Voting Machine Tapes; and 1,687 Clerk Books, etc.) we did not set
out to quantify the magnitude of voting irregularities that occurred,
but rather to analyze them in detail.

“Nevertheless, we
identified hundreds of cases of voting irregularities (in select
precincts) that warrant further investigation.”

Among the more
striking cases of fraud — or at the least, negligence by election
officials — was that of “150 Voter Slips citywide form the 2012 primary.
Twenty-three of these Voter Slips came from individuals who were not
registered to vote at the time of the election but voted on the Voting
Machine.”

The report also includes documentation and reports of
votes by members of one party incorrectly cast in the other. Since these
votes were cast on machines, the report concludes, “they were included
in the Certified Election Results, thus impacting the vote totals for
multiple races throughout Philadelphia and Pennsylvania.”

In one
of the most widely reported, and clearly egregious, stories out of the
report on voter impersonation, a man named “Joseph Cheeseboro” was
registered to vote in Oct. 1990 on an address in South Philadelphia that
is now a vacant lot. In November 2003, “Joseph J. Cheeseborough” was
registered to vote from a different address that is actually a 7-11
store. The signatures on the applications of 1990 and 2003 are
“different in both handwriting and spelling,” thus making Mr. Cheeseboro
— or Cheeseborough — a victim of voter impersonation.

If the
reaction from Democrats such as Stephanie Singer are any sign of things
to come, what is fast becoming known as the “Schmidt Report” may well be
a topic of controversy for weeks and months to come. And yet, it may
also lead to serious reforms and stronger enforcement in honest voting
that will be studied and replicated nationwide.