“Vote fraud targeted by new Pa. voter ID law no longer common”

Philadelphia Inquirer:

Then there’s absentee voting. David Oh, now a freshman on City Council, had sought office in 2007 and had a solid lead in unofficial tallies from voting machines. Yet it became a 122-vote loss – thanks to hundreds of absentee ballots, dozens of them “voting for exactly the same candidates, filled out in exactly the same way,” Oh recalls.

Wider problems with absentee ballots led a federal judge to overturn results of a key Philadelphia legislative race in 1993, deciding which party controlled the State Senate. Republican Bruce Marks was declared the winner over Democrat Bill Stinson after Judge Clarence Newcomer found forgeries and other problems affecting hundreds of ballots – about 90 percent of which favored Stinson.

The new law does add ID requirements for issuing absentee ballots, which could have helped curb the abuses suspected in the 2007 race and documented in 1993.

But the law’s main provision, requiring the state’s 8.2 million registered voters to produce drivers’ licenses or other official forms of photo ID, appears to target a kind of fraud that by all accounts hasn’t cropped up in recent years in the city or state.

“The phrase used is voter impersonation, where John Doe pretends to be Henry Jones in order to cast a vote,” Harvey said. “No one has identified any such cases, certainly in Philadelphia, in my time frame.” Harvey is 75.

The Administrative Office of Pennsylvania Courts reported last month that there had been no convictions for voter impersonation or voter fraud in Pennsylvania in the last five years. And at a recent budget hearing, when Corbett’s secretary of the commonwealth, Carol Aichele – who as head of the Department of State oversees elections – was asked about evidence of voter fraud in the state, she said she wasn’t aware of specific cases, adding, “There is no method to detect or deter voter fraud.”

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