DOYLESTOWN, PA -- When I sat down with Jordan Yeager, a lawyer and Democratic activist, he only had a few minutes to talk before he had to go back to work on the party's election-protection effort. He was surprised I hadn't heard about the controversy around the county's absentee ballots. "It's on Drudge," he explained.
Bucks County -- for which Doylestown is the county seat -- has seen a surprising increase in the number of absentee ballots, in part because of a voter turnout effort by Rep. Patrick Murphy's re-election campaign and the state party, which is worried about the impact of next year's redistricting. When Republicans began to raise ethical concerns about the campaign to provide voters with absentee ballots, the county election board, dominated by Republicans, read the increase as a sign of potential fraud and began challenging the ballots; they threw out 600, 82 percent of which were Democratic. After Yeager and I spoke, he returned to his law office to prepare a counter-challenge -- that the election board disenfranchised voters by targeting Democratic ballots.
"The Republicans have yet to point out where there has been any connection between the Murphy Campaign and the State Committee in anything fraudulent," John Cordisco, the chair of the county Democratic Party, told me this morning, noting that the district attorney has opened an investigation but not taken any action. "As of the moment, they have nothing to connect."
While there are unanswered questions about the mechanics of the Democrats' ballot drive, there doesn't seem to be an instance of fraud or even a clear mechanism by which Democrats could benefit from it -- as with most voter-fraud accusations, actually putting such a scheme into significant effect wouldn't be feasible. A hearing tomorrow morning should provide more clarity as to exactly what happened in this case.
However, this spat is a preview of what will happen after Tuesday's election. If, as I believe they will, Republicans significantly under-perform the high expectations they've created for themselves, they'll turn to politicizing the election results themselves, as Kevin Drum has observed in connection with this and other incidents of fraud accusation. If Republicans don't achieve their goals, any stories about a Democratic resurgence -- which is what observers in Pennsylvania are seeing, with even lackluster gubernatorial candidate Dan Onorato benefiting from a two-week bump in the polls -- will have to compete with arguments about voter fraud that frequently come to nothing, as my colleague Adam Serwer demonstrates for a living.
-- Tim Fernholz
