PHILADELPHIA — Republicans and Democrats in Pennsylvania appear ready to cry foul once the winner of the Keystone State’s 20 electoral votes edges out a victory.
Pennsylvania Republicans, concerned that mostly Democratic precincts in Philadelphia are prone to voter fraud issues, lost a court challenge last week when a district judge rejected the state party lawsuit seeking to overturn the restriction of out of county poll watchers.
“There are some areas that are predominantly Democratic. We will have watchers at those polls. We will have lawyers at certain sections of those counties getting ready to be dispatched,” Delaware County GOP Chairman Andy Reilly told The Daily Caller Monday night. “But the danger comes with what has allegedly happened in the past and you can never really investigate it, because they put the votes on the machine and you have an all Democratic election board.”
“They’ll start looking through the poll books and say, ‘Well, gee I know these four or five people in the neighborhood. They’re not coming up to vote. We will vote for them, because we know how they would vote if they were here.’ And so they go vote for them, and no one knows about it, and they are up on the machines,” Reilly said.
He added, “You don’t know about it so that’s why you need outside watchers when 95-99% of these precincts in Philadelphia are democrat to ensure that the votes are valid and procedures are being followed in the booth. That’s why the Republican Party of Pennsylvania filed that lawsuit.”
One Pennsylvania Republican poll watcher blames the Philadelphia GOP for not getting their act together early enough.
“One of the biggest problems is the Philadelphia County GOP. They are basically nonexistent, because it’s incumbent upon the committee people to get their polling stations manned,” she told TheDC Monday night. “And they are supposed to be there on the day of as well. They are supposed to be there at their precinct.”
Democrats, however, claim that Donald Trump and his campaign will intimidate and suppress Democratic voter turnout as a result of calling on his supporters to be “ballot integrity” volunteers in Pennsylvania and other key states.
U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond rejected the argument from Democrats, who wanted a court order Monday banning polling site activity they believe triggered by Trump and his supporters that will dampen their turnout.
Reilly’s own county came into the national spotlight when the state police raided the office of a Delaware County political field office of FieldWorks LLC, a national organization that engages in street campaign work often for Democratic candidates.
According Chairman Reilly, Fieldworks staffers gathered registrations, many of which were incomplete, with phony addresses and sent them to Washington DC. From there, the registrations were forwarded to the government rules department of state office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which Reilly said had “no authority to accept the registrations.”
“It’s clear to me that they had no screening for quality control in their organization,” Chairman Reilly said, noting that the registrations also lacked postmarks, which is required by state law.
“So they dumped…5000 of these last-minute [registrations] and used the heavy hand of the government and tried to force us to file them.”
Fieldworks only told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, that the organization has a “zero tolerance for fraud” and would cooperate with law enforcement “to seek the prosecution of anyone involved in wrongdoing.”