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Amid fraud allegations, Bucks County Board of Elections sequesters 8,000 absentee ballots
The Bucks County Board of Elections voted to sequester a little more than 8,000 absentee ballots during a special meeting Friday morning after questions were raised on Thursday by Republican Congressional candidate Michael Fitzpatrick over their legitimacy.
The decision followed three and a half hours worth of sometimes emotional testimony in which the three-member board heard from attorneys representing the Fitzpatrick campaign and the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, Deena Dean, director of the board of elections, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler and several members of the audience.
The board, made up of county commissioners Charles H. Martin and Diane M. Ellis-Marseglia and the Hon. Judge Wallace H. Bateman Jr., took two actions.
The first was to comply with a request by the Fitzpatrick campaign to hold the absentee ballots under lock and key and not to distribute them to the various polling places, which is traditionally done on Election Day. The vote passed 2-1 with Marseglia casting the no vote.
Sequestering the ballots, said Martin, is the fairest thing to do and will be helpful to the District Attorney as he investigates any fraudulent activity. Martin said by distributing the ballots to their voting precincts you would lose the integrity of the document and could compromise any evidence.
Martin argued there is precedent for sequestering every ballot, rather than just the 900 or so in question. “In 27 other counties in Pennsylvania, including the city of Philadelphia, the ballots are held in a central location and counted there and not distributed to the polling places,” he said.
“In order to settle down and to have whatever investigation is going to take place, collecting the ballots and holding them and looking at them after the election doesn’t harm anyone,” reasoned Martin.
If the voting margin is wide enough on Tuesday, the absentee ballots won’t even come into play, he said. “But I don’t know if that is going to be the case,” he said.
The last time Murphy and Fitzpatrick squared off, Murphy won with a 1,500 vote margin.
Marseglia said she just isn’t sure whether the county has the right to sequester every ballot. Continued...
The decision followed three and a half hours worth of sometimes emotional testimony in which the three-member board heard from attorneys representing the Fitzpatrick campaign and the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, Deena Dean, director of the board of elections, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler and several members of the audience.
The board, made up of county commissioners Charles H. Martin and Diane M. Ellis-Marseglia and the Hon. Judge Wallace H. Bateman Jr., took two actions.
The first was to comply with a request by the Fitzpatrick campaign to hold the absentee ballots under lock and key and not to distribute them to the various polling places, which is traditionally done on Election Day. The vote passed 2-1 with Marseglia casting the no vote.
Sequestering the ballots, said Martin, is the fairest thing to do and will be helpful to the District Attorney as he investigates any fraudulent activity. Martin said by distributing the ballots to their voting precincts you would lose the integrity of the document and could compromise any evidence.
Martin argued there is precedent for sequestering every ballot, rather than just the 900 or so in question. “In 27 other counties in Pennsylvania, including the city of Philadelphia, the ballots are held in a central location and counted there and not distributed to the polling places,” he said.
“In order to settle down and to have whatever investigation is going to take place, collecting the ballots and holding them and looking at them after the election doesn’t harm anyone,” reasoned Martin.
If the voting margin is wide enough on Tuesday, the absentee ballots won’t even come into play, he said. “But I don’t know if that is going to be the case,” he said.
The last time Murphy and Fitzpatrick squared off, Murphy won with a 1,500 vote margin.
Marseglia said she just isn’t sure whether the county has the right to sequester every ballot. Continued...
“It seems like a reasonable thing to ask that any ballot involving a challenge be sequestered,” she said. “But sequestering 8,000 ballots, I just don’t think that is in our purview.
“The law says you are not allowed to do what we’re doing,” said Marseglia. “It says you have to send the ballots to each precinct, and yet the Republicans, and I’m assuming they’re right, said that 27 counties are doing this. That means 27 counties are in violation, but no one’s doing anything.”
But she agreed with Martin that by sequestering all 8,000 ballots no harm would be done. “It’s just creating work that’s not necessary.”
The second vote was to extend the deadline for voters whose absentee ballots were rejected. Under the law, they would have had to rectify the issues by Friday at 5 p.m. The board gave them until 8 p.m. Tuesday night.
“A lot of these were delivered this week – Monday and Tuesday – and if they were rejected by the board of elections a letter is sent back offering them the chance to correct or challenge the findings,” said Martin. “If the letter was mailed on Wednesday, they may have just gotten it on Thursday or Friday giving them not a lot of notice to fix corrections.”
It’s just a matter of being fair and erring on the side of letting people have the opportunity to vote rather than restrict them from voting, he said.
Marseglia called the decisions “not perfect, but good. It’s all we could really do,” she said. “The most important thing is that what happened here is the result of the system, not our system, but Pennsylvania’s.
“It’s really difficult to vote absentee in Pennsylvania. We have deadlines that are difficult to reach. You have to apply to get the actual ballot which has its own set of deadlines. Then you have another set of deadlines for the ballot … We make it complicated for people. And there are a lot of openings in the law. It doesn’t tell you what to do in situations like this. There’s too much room for people to make different decisions.”
The board left the allegations of fraud up to the District Attorney’s office to investigate.
“We have more than 600 absentee ballot applications that they (the Board of Elections) believe to be significantly defective in ways that raise serious questions about whether they were in fact filed by the people in whose names they were filed,” said Heckler. Continued...
“The law says you are not allowed to do what we’re doing,” said Marseglia. “It says you have to send the ballots to each precinct, and yet the Republicans, and I’m assuming they’re right, said that 27 counties are doing this. That means 27 counties are in violation, but no one’s doing anything.”
But she agreed with Martin that by sequestering all 8,000 ballots no harm would be done. “It’s just creating work that’s not necessary.”
The second vote was to extend the deadline for voters whose absentee ballots were rejected. Under the law, they would have had to rectify the issues by Friday at 5 p.m. The board gave them until 8 p.m. Tuesday night.
“A lot of these were delivered this week – Monday and Tuesday – and if they were rejected by the board of elections a letter is sent back offering them the chance to correct or challenge the findings,” said Martin. “If the letter was mailed on Wednesday, they may have just gotten it on Thursday or Friday giving them not a lot of notice to fix corrections.”
It’s just a matter of being fair and erring on the side of letting people have the opportunity to vote rather than restrict them from voting, he said.
Marseglia called the decisions “not perfect, but good. It’s all we could really do,” she said. “The most important thing is that what happened here is the result of the system, not our system, but Pennsylvania’s.
“It’s really difficult to vote absentee in Pennsylvania. We have deadlines that are difficult to reach. You have to apply to get the actual ballot which has its own set of deadlines. Then you have another set of deadlines for the ballot … We make it complicated for people. And there are a lot of openings in the law. It doesn’t tell you what to do in situations like this. There’s too much room for people to make different decisions.”
The board left the allegations of fraud up to the District Attorney’s office to investigate.
“We have more than 600 absentee ballot applications that they (the Board of Elections) believe to be significantly defective in ways that raise serious questions about whether they were in fact filed by the people in whose names they were filed,” said Heckler. Continued...
“There may be various explanations for that, certainly a number of them non-criminal,” said Heckler. “But a cursory inspection of the applications themselves that are in the possession of the Board of Elections show signatures which appear to have been forged. That is clearly a crime. To what extent that we would be able to prove who committed the crime is another matter.”
Heckler said he is committed to staying “out of the way” of the board of elections and not interfering in anyway with the outcome of the election.
“What the investigation to this point amounts to is arranging with the board of elections that when they get these applications in that they staple the envelope in which it came to the rejected application itself. It’s most likely that any scientific evidence – DNA, fingerprints – would be on the envelope. If we determine that the application is forged, then we can have some hope that there would be scientific proof to connect the forged ballot to the person who forged it.”
The issue boiled to the surface on Thursday when Fitzpatrick alleged that the [Patrick] Murphy campaign “has engaged in an illegal scheme” involving election fraud.
“It now appears, based on affidavits submitted by Democratic voters and news accounts, that the Murphy campaign has engaged in an illegal scheme to violate absentee ballot laws by instructing people to submit absentee ballot applications when they were not eligible to cast them and to forge the signatures of family members," said Fitzpatrick.
The controversy surrounds a series of letters sent to area residents from an organization called the "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office," which Fitzpatrick claims was created for “the express purpose of funneling absentee ballot applications into the hands of political operatives of the Patrick Murphy campaign.”
Fitzpatrick said there are also allegations of “blatant forgery on absentee ballot applications. Obviously, the Murphy campaign found themselves in electoral trouble and sought to increase their votes using a fraudulent scheme.”
The Murphy campaign wasted little time in responding to Friday’s decisions, issuing a press statement headlined, “GOP-controlled election panel decides in favor of … GOP.”
“It’s clear that Mike Fitzpatrick and his Republican allies are making up election law as they go along for political purposes, using Florida-style tactics in an attempt to steal the election. We know what comes next – the GOP machine will start challenging Democratic votes but we will fight to protect the vote,” said Murphy.
The campaign cited Article 7, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania State Constitution and Section 3146.8 of the Pennsylvania Election Code, which says “clearly and unequivocally require that the absentee ballots be counted at the precincts. Continued...
Heckler said he is committed to staying “out of the way” of the board of elections and not interfering in anyway with the outcome of the election.
“What the investigation to this point amounts to is arranging with the board of elections that when they get these applications in that they staple the envelope in which it came to the rejected application itself. It’s most likely that any scientific evidence – DNA, fingerprints – would be on the envelope. If we determine that the application is forged, then we can have some hope that there would be scientific proof to connect the forged ballot to the person who forged it.”
The issue boiled to the surface on Thursday when Fitzpatrick alleged that the [Patrick] Murphy campaign “has engaged in an illegal scheme” involving election fraud.
“It now appears, based on affidavits submitted by Democratic voters and news accounts, that the Murphy campaign has engaged in an illegal scheme to violate absentee ballot laws by instructing people to submit absentee ballot applications when they were not eligible to cast them and to forge the signatures of family members," said Fitzpatrick.
The controversy surrounds a series of letters sent to area residents from an organization called the "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office," which Fitzpatrick claims was created for “the express purpose of funneling absentee ballot applications into the hands of political operatives of the Patrick Murphy campaign.”
Fitzpatrick said there are also allegations of “blatant forgery on absentee ballot applications. Obviously, the Murphy campaign found themselves in electoral trouble and sought to increase their votes using a fraudulent scheme.”
The Murphy campaign wasted little time in responding to Friday’s decisions, issuing a press statement headlined, “GOP-controlled election panel decides in favor of … GOP.”
“It’s clear that Mike Fitzpatrick and his Republican allies are making up election law as they go along for political purposes, using Florida-style tactics in an attempt to steal the election. We know what comes next – the GOP machine will start challenging Democratic votes but we will fight to protect the vote,” said Murphy.
The campaign cited Article 7, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania State Constitution and Section 3146.8 of the Pennsylvania Election Code, which says “clearly and unequivocally require that the absentee ballots be counted at the precincts. Continued...
“It should also be noted that the panel acknowledged that the Board of Elections had improperly rejected eligible, registered Democratic absentee ballot requests,” he said.
The Democratic Party of Pennsylvania filed suit on Thursday against the Board of Elections alleging that the "Republican-dominated board" has been systematically targeting and rejecting Democratic absentee ballot requests by a 6-to-1 margin.
The Murphy campaign alleges that the Board tampered with absentee ballot applications to help Republican candidate Mike Fitzpatrick, altering and fixing those that were incorrect or incomplete to keep them from being rejected. At the same time, it says the board has been rejecting hundreds of Democratic applications, often based on the same problems that they fixed on the Republican applications.
Fitzpatrick’s campaign manager Kyle Whatley responded on Saturday by releasing a statement, which read, in part, “Congressman Patrick Murphy continues to act like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. His campaign has been linked to a deceptive scheme with a post office box in Bristol that purported to be an official government office. Rather than accounting for what was done with absentee ballot applications received at this office, Patrick Murphy continues to try to deflect blame to everyone else.”
In the statement, Whatley said on Friday, lawyers for Democratic State Committee “admitted that absentee ballot applications received by the fictitious Pennsylvania Office of Voter Assistance were sorted according to party registration. Patrick Murphy has refused to answer why this was done."
Since the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot passed at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Whatley said Democratic operatives have delivered hundreds of additional applications past the deadline.
“Had these voters delivered their applications directly to the Courthouse rather than use this fake office as a middleman, they would have met the deadline,” he said. “Instead, the Murphy campaign's involvement has deprived these individuals of the right to cast an absentee ballot. Many additional ballots received through the Office of Voter Assistance were delivered to the Board of Elections months after they were dated by voters.”
In addition, Whatley said the District Attorney has opened a criminal investigation into election fraud on absentee ballot applications citing clear evidence of forgeries on absentee ballot applications.
”Congressman Patrick Murphy needs to respond to what was done with absentee ballot applications, why they were sorted, why they were delayed in being delivered to the courthouse.”
In the end, Marseglia surmised, “it’s probably much ado about nothing. It’s just one big political ad.”
The Democratic Party of Pennsylvania filed suit on Thursday against the Board of Elections alleging that the "Republican-dominated board" has been systematically targeting and rejecting Democratic absentee ballot requests by a 6-to-1 margin.
The Murphy campaign alleges that the Board tampered with absentee ballot applications to help Republican candidate Mike Fitzpatrick, altering and fixing those that were incorrect or incomplete to keep them from being rejected. At the same time, it says the board has been rejecting hundreds of Democratic applications, often based on the same problems that they fixed on the Republican applications.
Fitzpatrick’s campaign manager Kyle Whatley responded on Saturday by releasing a statement, which read, in part, “Congressman Patrick Murphy continues to act like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. His campaign has been linked to a deceptive scheme with a post office box in Bristol that purported to be an official government office. Rather than accounting for what was done with absentee ballot applications received at this office, Patrick Murphy continues to try to deflect blame to everyone else.”
In the statement, Whatley said on Friday, lawyers for Democratic State Committee “admitted that absentee ballot applications received by the fictitious Pennsylvania Office of Voter Assistance were sorted according to party registration. Patrick Murphy has refused to answer why this was done."
Since the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot passed at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Whatley said Democratic operatives have delivered hundreds of additional applications past the deadline.
“Had these voters delivered their applications directly to the Courthouse rather than use this fake office as a middleman, they would have met the deadline,” he said. “Instead, the Murphy campaign's involvement has deprived these individuals of the right to cast an absentee ballot. Many additional ballots received through the Office of Voter Assistance were delivered to the Board of Elections months after they were dated by voters.”
In addition, Whatley said the District Attorney has opened a criminal investigation into election fraud on absentee ballot applications citing clear evidence of forgeries on absentee ballot applications.
”Congressman Patrick Murphy needs to respond to what was done with absentee ballot applications, why they were sorted, why they were delayed in being delivered to the courthouse.”
In the end, Marseglia surmised, “it’s probably much ado about nothing. It’s just one big political ad.”
The Bucks County Board of Elections voted to sequester a little more than 8,000 absentee ballots during a special meeting Friday morning after questions were raised on Thursday by Republican Congressional candidate Michael Fitzpatrick over their legitimacy.
The decision followed three and a half hours worth of sometimes emotional testimony in which the three-member board heard from attorneys representing the Fitzpatrick campaign and the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, Deena Dean, director of the board of elections, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler and several members of the audience.
The board, made up of county commissioners Charles H. Martin and Diane M. Ellis-Marseglia and the Hon. Judge Wallace H. Bateman Jr., took two actions.
The first was to comply with a request by the Fitzpatrick campaign to hold the absentee ballots under lock and key and not to distribute them to the various polling places, which is traditionally done on Election Day. The vote passed 2-1 with Marseglia casting the no vote.
Sequestering the ballots, said Martin, is the fairest thing to do and will be helpful to the District Attorney as he investigates any fraudulent activity. Martin said by distributing the ballots to their voting precincts you would lose the integrity of the document and could compromise any evidence.
Martin argued there is precedent for sequestering every ballot, rather than just the 900 or so in question. “In 27 other counties in Pennsylvania, including the city of Philadelphia, the ballots are held in a central location and counted there and not distributed to the polling places,” he said.
“In order to settle down and to have whatever investigation is going to take place, collecting the ballots and holding them and looking at them after the election doesn’t harm anyone,” reasoned Martin.
If the voting margin is wide enough on Tuesday, the absentee ballots won’t even come into play, he said. “But I don’t know if that is going to be the case,” he said.
The last time Murphy and Fitzpatrick squared off, Murphy won with a 1,500 vote margin.
Marseglia said she just isn’t sure whether the county has the right to sequester every ballot.
“It seems like a reasonable thing to ask that any ballot involving a challenge be sequestered,” she said. “But sequestering 8,000 ballots, I just don’t think that is in our purview.
“The law says you are not allowed to do what we’re doing,” said Marseglia. “It says you have to send the ballots to each precinct, and yet the Republicans, and I’m assuming they’re right, said that 27 counties are doing this. That means 27 counties are in violation, but no one’s doing anything.”
But she agreed with Martin that by sequestering all 8,000 ballots no harm would be done. “It’s just creating work that’s not necessary.”
The second vote was to extend the deadline for voters whose absentee ballots were rejected. Under the law, they would have had to rectify the issues by Friday at 5 p.m. The board gave them until 8 p.m. Tuesday night.
“A lot of these were delivered this week – Monday and Tuesday – and if they were rejected by the board of elections a letter is sent back offering them the chance to correct or challenge the findings,” said Martin. “If the letter was mailed on Wednesday, they may have just gotten it on Thursday or Friday giving them not a lot of notice to fix corrections.”
It’s just a matter of being fair and erring on the side of letting people have the opportunity to vote rather than restrict them from voting, he said.
Marseglia called the decisions “not perfect, but good. It’s all we could really do,” she said. “The most important thing is that what happened here is the result of the system, not our system, but Pennsylvania’s.
“It’s really difficult to vote absentee in Pennsylvania. We have deadlines that are difficult to reach. You have to apply to get the actual ballot which has its own set of deadlines. Then you have another set of deadlines for the ballot … We make it complicated for people. And there are a lot of openings in the law. It doesn’t tell you what to do in situations like this. There’s too much room for people to make different decisions.”
The board left the allegations of fraud up to the District Attorney’s office to investigate.
“We have more than 600 absentee ballot applications that they (the Board of Elections) believe to be significantly defective in ways that raise serious questions about whether they were in fact filed by the people in whose names they were filed,” said Heckler.
“There may be various explanations for that, certainly a number of them non-criminal,” said Heckler. “But a cursory inspection of the applications themselves that are in the possession of the Board of Elections show signatures which appear to have been forged. That is clearly a crime. To what extent that we would be able to prove who committed the crime is another matter.”
Heckler said he is committed to staying “out of the way” of the board of elections and not interfering in anyway with the outcome of the election.
“What the investigation to this point amounts to is arranging with the board of elections that when they get these applications in that they staple the envelope in which it came to the rejected application itself. It’s most likely that any scientific evidence – DNA, fingerprints – would be on the envelope. If we determine that the application is forged, then we can have some hope that there would be scientific proof to connect the forged ballot to the person who forged it.”
The issue boiled to the surface on Thursday when Fitzpatrick alleged that the [Patrick] Murphy campaign “has engaged in an illegal scheme” involving election fraud.
“It now appears, based on affidavits submitted by Democratic voters and news accounts, that the Murphy campaign has engaged in an illegal scheme to violate absentee ballot laws by instructing people to submit absentee ballot applications when they were not eligible to cast them and to forge the signatures of family members," said Fitzpatrick.
The controversy surrounds a series of letters sent to area residents from an organization called the "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office," which Fitzpatrick claims was created for “the express purpose of funneling absentee ballot applications into the hands of political operatives of the Patrick Murphy campaign.”
Fitzpatrick said there are also allegations of “blatant forgery on absentee ballot applications. Obviously, the Murphy campaign found themselves in electoral trouble and sought to increase their votes using a fraudulent scheme.”
The Murphy campaign wasted little time in responding to Friday’s decisions, issuing a press statement headlined, “GOP-controlled election panel decides in favor of … GOP.”
“It’s clear that Mike Fitzpatrick and his Republican allies are making up election law as they go along for political purposes, using Florida-style tactics in an attempt to steal the election. We know what comes next – the GOP machine will start challenging Democratic votes but we will fight to protect the vote,” said Murphy.
The campaign cited Article 7, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania State Constitution and Section 3146.8 of the Pennsylvania Election Code, which says “clearly and unequivocally require that the absentee ballots be counted at the precincts.
“It should also be noted that the panel acknowledged that the Board of Elections had improperly rejected eligible, registered Democratic absentee ballot requests,” he said.
The Democratic Party of Pennsylvania filed suit on Thursday against the Board of Elections alleging that the "Republican-dominated board" has been systematically targeting and rejecting Democratic absentee ballot requests by a 6-to-1 margin.
The Murphy campaign alleges that the Board tampered with absentee ballot applications to help Republican candidate Mike Fitzpatrick, altering and fixing those that were incorrect or incomplete to keep them from being rejected. At the same time, it says the board has been rejecting hundreds of Democratic applications, often based on the same problems that they fixed on the Republican applications.
Fitzpatrick’s campaign manager Kyle Whatley responded on Saturday by releasing a statement, which read, in part, “Congressman Patrick Murphy continues to act like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. His campaign has been linked to a deceptive scheme with a post office box in Bristol that purported to be an official government office. Rather than accounting for what was done with absentee ballot applications received at this office, Patrick Murphy continues to try to deflect blame to everyone else.”
In the statement, Whatley said on Friday, lawyers for Democratic State Committee “admitted that absentee ballot applications received by the fictitious Pennsylvania Office of Voter Assistance were sorted according to party registration. Patrick Murphy has refused to answer why this was done."
Since the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot passed at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Whatley said Democratic operatives have delivered hundreds of additional applications past the deadline.
“Had these voters delivered their applications directly to the Courthouse rather than use this fake office as a middleman, they would have met the deadline,” he said. “Instead, the Murphy campaign's involvement has deprived these individuals of the right to cast an absentee ballot. Many additional ballots received through the Office of Voter Assistance were delivered to the Board of Elections months after they were dated by voters.”
In addition, Whatley said the District Attorney has opened a criminal investigation into election fraud on absentee ballot applications citing clear evidence of forgeries on absentee ballot applications.
”Congressman Patrick Murphy needs to respond to what was done with absentee ballot applications, why they were sorted, why they were delayed in being delivered to the courthouse.”
In the end, Marseglia surmised, “it’s probably much ado about nothing. It’s just one big political ad.”
The decision followed three and a half hours worth of sometimes emotional testimony in which the three-member board heard from attorneys representing the Fitzpatrick campaign and the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, Deena Dean, director of the board of elections, Bucks County District Attorney David Heckler and several members of the audience.
The board, made up of county commissioners Charles H. Martin and Diane M. Ellis-Marseglia and the Hon. Judge Wallace H. Bateman Jr., took two actions.
The first was to comply with a request by the Fitzpatrick campaign to hold the absentee ballots under lock and key and not to distribute them to the various polling places, which is traditionally done on Election Day. The vote passed 2-1 with Marseglia casting the no vote.
Sequestering the ballots, said Martin, is the fairest thing to do and will be helpful to the District Attorney as he investigates any fraudulent activity. Martin said by distributing the ballots to their voting precincts you would lose the integrity of the document and could compromise any evidence.
Martin argued there is precedent for sequestering every ballot, rather than just the 900 or so in question. “In 27 other counties in Pennsylvania, including the city of Philadelphia, the ballots are held in a central location and counted there and not distributed to the polling places,” he said.
“In order to settle down and to have whatever investigation is going to take place, collecting the ballots and holding them and looking at them after the election doesn’t harm anyone,” reasoned Martin.
If the voting margin is wide enough on Tuesday, the absentee ballots won’t even come into play, he said. “But I don’t know if that is going to be the case,” he said.
The last time Murphy and Fitzpatrick squared off, Murphy won with a 1,500 vote margin.
Marseglia said she just isn’t sure whether the county has the right to sequester every ballot.
“It seems like a reasonable thing to ask that any ballot involving a challenge be sequestered,” she said. “But sequestering 8,000 ballots, I just don’t think that is in our purview.
“The law says you are not allowed to do what we’re doing,” said Marseglia. “It says you have to send the ballots to each precinct, and yet the Republicans, and I’m assuming they’re right, said that 27 counties are doing this. That means 27 counties are in violation, but no one’s doing anything.”
But she agreed with Martin that by sequestering all 8,000 ballots no harm would be done. “It’s just creating work that’s not necessary.”
The second vote was to extend the deadline for voters whose absentee ballots were rejected. Under the law, they would have had to rectify the issues by Friday at 5 p.m. The board gave them until 8 p.m. Tuesday night.
“A lot of these were delivered this week – Monday and Tuesday – and if they were rejected by the board of elections a letter is sent back offering them the chance to correct or challenge the findings,” said Martin. “If the letter was mailed on Wednesday, they may have just gotten it on Thursday or Friday giving them not a lot of notice to fix corrections.”
It’s just a matter of being fair and erring on the side of letting people have the opportunity to vote rather than restrict them from voting, he said.
Marseglia called the decisions “not perfect, but good. It’s all we could really do,” she said. “The most important thing is that what happened here is the result of the system, not our system, but Pennsylvania’s.
“It’s really difficult to vote absentee in Pennsylvania. We have deadlines that are difficult to reach. You have to apply to get the actual ballot which has its own set of deadlines. Then you have another set of deadlines for the ballot … We make it complicated for people. And there are a lot of openings in the law. It doesn’t tell you what to do in situations like this. There’s too much room for people to make different decisions.”
The board left the allegations of fraud up to the District Attorney’s office to investigate.
“We have more than 600 absentee ballot applications that they (the Board of Elections) believe to be significantly defective in ways that raise serious questions about whether they were in fact filed by the people in whose names they were filed,” said Heckler.
“There may be various explanations for that, certainly a number of them non-criminal,” said Heckler. “But a cursory inspection of the applications themselves that are in the possession of the Board of Elections show signatures which appear to have been forged. That is clearly a crime. To what extent that we would be able to prove who committed the crime is another matter.”
Heckler said he is committed to staying “out of the way” of the board of elections and not interfering in anyway with the outcome of the election.
“What the investigation to this point amounts to is arranging with the board of elections that when they get these applications in that they staple the envelope in which it came to the rejected application itself. It’s most likely that any scientific evidence – DNA, fingerprints – would be on the envelope. If we determine that the application is forged, then we can have some hope that there would be scientific proof to connect the forged ballot to the person who forged it.”
The issue boiled to the surface on Thursday when Fitzpatrick alleged that the [Patrick] Murphy campaign “has engaged in an illegal scheme” involving election fraud.
“It now appears, based on affidavits submitted by Democratic voters and news accounts, that the Murphy campaign has engaged in an illegal scheme to violate absentee ballot laws by instructing people to submit absentee ballot applications when they were not eligible to cast them and to forge the signatures of family members," said Fitzpatrick.
The controversy surrounds a series of letters sent to area residents from an organization called the "Pennsylvania Voter Assistance Office," which Fitzpatrick claims was created for “the express purpose of funneling absentee ballot applications into the hands of political operatives of the Patrick Murphy campaign.”
Fitzpatrick said there are also allegations of “blatant forgery on absentee ballot applications. Obviously, the Murphy campaign found themselves in electoral trouble and sought to increase their votes using a fraudulent scheme.”
The Murphy campaign wasted little time in responding to Friday’s decisions, issuing a press statement headlined, “GOP-controlled election panel decides in favor of … GOP.”
“It’s clear that Mike Fitzpatrick and his Republican allies are making up election law as they go along for political purposes, using Florida-style tactics in an attempt to steal the election. We know what comes next – the GOP machine will start challenging Democratic votes but we will fight to protect the vote,” said Murphy.
The campaign cited Article 7, Section 14 of the Pennsylvania State Constitution and Section 3146.8 of the Pennsylvania Election Code, which says “clearly and unequivocally require that the absentee ballots be counted at the precincts.
“It should also be noted that the panel acknowledged that the Board of Elections had improperly rejected eligible, registered Democratic absentee ballot requests,” he said.
The Democratic Party of Pennsylvania filed suit on Thursday against the Board of Elections alleging that the "Republican-dominated board" has been systematically targeting and rejecting Democratic absentee ballot requests by a 6-to-1 margin.
The Murphy campaign alleges that the Board tampered with absentee ballot applications to help Republican candidate Mike Fitzpatrick, altering and fixing those that were incorrect or incomplete to keep them from being rejected. At the same time, it says the board has been rejecting hundreds of Democratic applications, often based on the same problems that they fixed on the Republican applications.
Fitzpatrick’s campaign manager Kyle Whatley responded on Saturday by releasing a statement, which read, in part, “Congressman Patrick Murphy continues to act like a little kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar. His campaign has been linked to a deceptive scheme with a post office box in Bristol that purported to be an official government office. Rather than accounting for what was done with absentee ballot applications received at this office, Patrick Murphy continues to try to deflect blame to everyone else.”
In the statement, Whatley said on Friday, lawyers for Democratic State Committee “admitted that absentee ballot applications received by the fictitious Pennsylvania Office of Voter Assistance were sorted according to party registration. Patrick Murphy has refused to answer why this was done."
Since the deadline to apply for an absentee ballot passed at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Whatley said Democratic operatives have delivered hundreds of additional applications past the deadline.
“Had these voters delivered their applications directly to the Courthouse rather than use this fake office as a middleman, they would have met the deadline,” he said. “Instead, the Murphy campaign's involvement has deprived these individuals of the right to cast an absentee ballot. Many additional ballots received through the Office of Voter Assistance were delivered to the Board of Elections months after they were dated by voters.”
In addition, Whatley said the District Attorney has opened a criminal investigation into election fraud on absentee ballot applications citing clear evidence of forgeries on absentee ballot applications.
”Congressman Patrick Murphy needs to respond to what was done with absentee ballot applications, why they were sorted, why they were delayed in being delivered to the courthouse.”
In the end, Marseglia surmised, “it’s probably much ado about nothing. It’s just one big political ad.”
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