Ex-Dem Congressman Who Took Abscam Bribes Admits To Rigging Philly Elections - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Ex-Dem Congressman Who Took Abscam Bribes Admits To Rigging Philly Elections
June 8th 2022


A Democrat who was booted from the House of Representatives and went to prison for his role in a 1970s bribery scandal pleaded guilty Monday to stuffing Philadelphia-area ballot boxes with fraudulent votes for years to get his party’s candidates elected.

Former U.S. Rep. Michael J. “Ozzie” Myers, who was expelled from Congress in 1980 after being caught taking bribes in the Abscam sting investigation, cheated to help local candidates he worked for win the elections, federal prosecutors said. Myers, 79, was a political consultant in the Philadelphia area.

“Votes are not things to be purchased and democracy is not for sale,” U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said in a news release.



Former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers, convicted in the ‘70s Abscam investigation, plead guilty in Philly to fraudulently adding votes for candidates (2014-16)who had hired him. He persuaded poll workers to stuff ballot boxes. Faces 20 yrs. To life. https://t.co/3DdHNu1hZi





Myers pleaded guilty to violations of election law, conspiracy, bribery and obstruction. Prosecutors said Myers stuffed ballot boxes in elections from 2014-2018.

Myers’ “criminal efforts were generally, although not exclusively, directed at securing election victories for local judicial candidates running for Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas or Municipal Court who had employed Myers as a ‘political consultant,’” prosecutors said.

Myers admitted he bribed elections judge Domenick Demuro to add votes for his chosen candidates, including clients who were running for judge. The bribes were for as little as $300 and as much as $5,000, authorities said. Demuro pleaded guilty in May 2020 and was convicted for his role in accepting bribes to cast fraudulent ballots and certify false voting results. Myers also conspired with another elections judge, Marie Beren, to pressure voters on election days to vote for candidates that Myers had selected. Been, who cast fraudulent votes for people who did not appear at the polls, pleaded guilty to election crimes last October.

In the late 1970s Abscam sting, Myers, then a two-term congressman, was convicted of bribery and conspiracy for taking $50,000 from FBI agents posing as Arab sheiks. He served just over a year in prison. Myers had served six years in the Pennsylvania legislature before being elected to Congress in 1976.

The Abscam sting swept up five other U.S. House members all but one of whom were Democrats, U.S. Senator Harrison Williams, (D-N.J.), three Philadelphia City Council members and the then-mayor of Camden.

One of the House members netted in the sting, South Carolina Democrat John Jenrette, was famously caught telling an undercover agent posing as a sheikh and offering a bribe, “I’ve got larceny in my blood. I’d take it in a goddamn minute.”

Myers faces up to 20 years in prison on the new charges.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/fo ... tion-fraud

https://www.dailywire.com/news/ex-dem-c ... -elections
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In other news...
The irony is just too good. Two Republican delegates were caught trying to vote more than once in the county clerk primary at Salt Lake County’s GOP nominating convention, an event where officials touted the party’s “election integrity” efforts.

Two men attempted to submit more than one paper ballot into the primary ballot box, according to Salt Lake County GOP Chairman Chris Null. They were caught in the act and then stripped of their delegate titles. “One person took two ballots and stuffed [them] into the container … he ran off,” said Null, according to KSL NewsRadio. “Another person attempted, and that person we stopped it before he was able to accomplish it.”

Officials then asked the second man to come to the stage to explain why he was trying to stuff the ballot box. According to Null, the man “claimed he didn’t” try to vote more than once. But, Null said, “We had enough witnesses.” https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/republican-ballot-stuffing-salt-lake-county-1335533/


Matt Rourke/AP

Republicans have spent the year and a half since Donald Trump’s election loss claiming without evidence that Democrats have been working to rig the nation’s elections. They’ve pointed to Pennsylvania, in particular, one of the main battlegrounds in the right’s effort to overturn the 2020 election results. The conspiracy theory that the state’s elections were crooked has been pushed so fervently that voting officials even sued Trump and his cronies for defamation over the unfounded allegations.

But as is proving to be the case across the nation, in Pennsylvania it’s Republicans who seem to be the ones trying to game the system to their advantage. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported last week that Billy Lanzilotti, a 23-year-old GOP operative and chairman of South Philadelphia’s Republican Registration Coalition, was signing voters up to receive mail-in ballots, but having the ballots sent not to the homes of the voters, but to the PAC’s P.O. box. Republican leaders voted on Saturday to remove him from his post as the leader of Philadelphia’s 39th ward, and the Inquirer reported on Wednesday that two state party staffers were fired because of their affiliation with Lanzilotti’s PAC. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/pennsylvania-republican-staffers-fired-ballot-harvesting-1352173/
According to Donald Trump, 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia's 2020 presidential election. As is too often the case, the former president simply made up the tally and pretended it was true.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported this morning that the actual number was much smaller.

False claims that there were thousands of ballots cast in the names of dead Georgia voters can now rest in peace. Election investigators found just four absentee ballots in the 2020 presidential election from voters who had died, all of them returned by relatives.

To be sure, there were many related allegations, but the State Election Board could only find four cases, and each were referred to the state attorney general's office.

As the Journal-Constitution's report added, "It's the latest in a series of unsubstantiated claims of fraud that have since been debunked, including allegations of counterfeit ballots, ballot stuffing and forged absentee ballot signatures. Three vote counts showed that Trump lost by about 12,000 votes in Georgia."

And while it's not clear which party's candidates benefited from three of these four ballots, the Journal-Constitution pointed to Sharon Nelson, a 74-year-old widow who submitted an absentee ballot on behalf of her husband, who died in September 2020, just a couple of months before the election.

Her lawyer conceded that she carried out her late husband's wishes, and voted Republican, though Nelson "now realizes that was not the thing to do."

Revisiting our earlier coverage, I'm struck by the familiarity of the circumstances. It was, after all, just last month when Donald Kirk Hartle illegally cast a Republican ballot for his late wife, lied about it, and got caught. He also received a fairly light sentence.

He was hardly alone. We learned in May about Pennsylvania's Bruce Bartman, who cast an absentee ballot in support of Trump for his mother — who died in 2008. Bartman pleaded guilty to unlawful voting, conceded he "listened to too much propaganda," and was sentenced to five years' probation.

About a month later, Edward Snodgrass, a local Republican official in Ohio, admitted to forging his dead father's signature on an absentee ballot and then voting again as himself. NBC News noted at the time that Snodgrass struck a deal with prosecutors and was sentenced to three days in jail and a $500 fine. https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/georgia-officials-find-pro-gop-ballot-was-cast-dead-voter-n1286647
https://republicansexposed.org/republicans-commit-voter-fraud/

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