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Even before the polls opened, Bruce Marks knew something wasn’t right.
Two weeks before a 1993 special election for a Pennsylvania state Senate district in Philadelphia, Marks was walking down the street in Center City when he was stopped by a Democratic member of the City Council, who warned Marks that there would be fraud in the race using absentee mail ballots.
Marks, the Republican candidate, dispatched one of his advisers to the City Commissioners office to pull the absentee ballot applications, and the aide reported an unusually high number of them, many filled out with information that raised questions about their legitimacy.
“We're getting all this information that there's something wrong with these absentee ballot applications and there's just gotta be somebody behind it,” Marks recalled during a recent interview.
He was right. There was somebody behind it.
It was the campaign of his Democratic opponent, William Stinson, which had arranged to have hundreds of voters cast illegitimate absentee ballots. As the scheme unraveled in the ensuing months, the discovery resulted in a judge vacating Stinson’s win and appointing Marks to the seat, flipping control of the state Senate.
Now infamous, the incident serves as a glaring example of wrongdoing in a city that has had several high-profile election scandals and is perpetually targeted by accusations of fraud. Long before Donald Trump zeroed in on Philadelphia as a place where “bad things happen,” campaigns and conservative activists maligned the city as so rife with corruption and cheating, that its elections can’t be trusted.
That reputation is hardly fair, public officials in the city and outside observers say. In many cases, they say, it misrepresents the facts of past incidents, obscures the reality of how modern elections work, and draws from racist attitudes toward a city with a predominantly Black population.
Even so, they expect the cycle of vilifying the city’s elections to continue.
As Trump takes the stage Tuesday at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia for his first debate with Democrat Kamala Harris, Pennsylvanians will be reminded of Trump’s tendency to disparage Philadelphia elections, as he famously did at a debate in 2020.
“What’s dangerous about the history in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania is that there are enough truths to give rise to the big lie,” said Brett Mandel, an author and past candidate for city controller who wrote Philadelphia, Corrupt and Consenting, a book about the city’s history of corruption.
And the danger of lingering distrust is real. City election officials faced death threats in 2020, and last year two Virginia men were sentenced for bringing weapons to the Pennsylvania Convention Center where mail ballots for the November 2020 election were being counted.
Despite reforms aimed at tightening voting security, Mandel said, Philadelphia’s history of election misdeeds “allows actors who are trying to sway the public to say, ‘Look, bad things happen in Philadelphia.’”
Trump has already started again this year. “Philadelphia was one of the most egregious places anywhere in the world,” he told a crowd at Temple University in June, referring to the 2020 election. “They used COVID to cheat.” He continued making false claims about ballot box stuffing in the city during an August rally in North Carolina and this past weekend baselessly predicted more cheating could cost him the state again this year.
Trump did not cite any specific incidents, and there has been no evidence that fraud or cheating cost him any meaningful number of votes in the city or the state, in 2016 or 2020.
For Marks, on the other hand, election fraud in Philadelphia is something real — something that he encountered personally and that ended up shaping part of his career.
He recounted that experience from his 17th-floor office in Center City, where a framed Philadelphia Inquirer front page hung on the wall across from his desk, vindicating his anti-fraud campaign.
“Legal battle won, Marks is sworn in,” the headline read.
Not far off from it, on a side table sat a red “Make America Great Again” hat, and a champagne bottle emblazoned with “Trump” in large gold lettering, tributes to the former president he represented in court during election challenges in 2020.
Democrats’ dominance feeds GOP suspicions
Attacks on elections in Philadelphia have been a running theme of Trump’s presidential campaigns.
During a presidential debate in September 2020, he accused the city of blocking poll watchers from observing early in-person voting in the city. He was wrong — since the location was not a polling place and campaigns did not have a legal right to be there — but the claim quickly spread online because of the snappy way he said it: “Bad things happen in Philadelphia.”
The statement tapped into the frustrations of Republicans who have long felt they can’t get a fair shake in the city.
Philadelphia is a Democratic stronghold — currently, more than 70% of voters are registered with the party.
It hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Bernard Samuel left office in 1952. A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won the city since Herbert Hoover carried Pennsylvania two decades earlier. Democrats have held majority control of the City Commissioners office, which oversees elections, since the 1950s.
With that dominance have come accusations of fraud from the other side.
“Are you going to sit here and tell me the unions don‘t vote the graveyard in Illinois, in Philadelphia?” Jack Burkman, a Republican strategist who later pleaded guilty to voter intimidation, said on NBC in 2004.
A local GOP operative that year said Republicans would “combat the vote fraud in Philadelphia” by keeping an eye on instances where ward leaders cast ballots in place of voters who don’t show up.
The operative didn’t offer any evidence at the time, but there have been such instances more recently.
In 2022, former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers (D., Pa.) pleaded guilty to a scheme of bribing two polling place supervisors to add fraudulent votes on behalf of clients of his political consulting firm, from 2014 to 2018.
Prosecutors did not say whether those actions changed the outcome of any election. In an indictment against Myers, they wrote that the most votes one of the polling place officials ever added was 46.
Marks also said there was some of this in his 1993 race. But the problem that led to a judge overturning his race was mostly with absentee ballots.
According to court documents and coverage from The Inquirer, Stinson’s campaign workers went door-to-door encouraging hundreds of ineligible voters to sign up for absentee ballots. Workers told prospective voters they could use the absentee ballots “as a matter of convenience,” even though this form of voting is reserved for voters who will be out of their voting district on Election Day or have an illness preventing them from going to their polling place. The campaign specifically targeted Black and Latino communities, Stinson campaign workers testified in court.
Campaign workers also misled some voters, and then filled out the ballots for them.
Lydia Colon, a voter in the city’s 19th Ward, told The Inquirer a Democratic committeeman promised he would come clean her yard if she voted absentee.
But Colon was not ill or out of town on Election Day, making her ineligible to vote absentee.
The committeeman filled out the ballot for her, Colon told The Inquirer. “I feel that I was taken for a ride. I just signed the papers and that’s it.”
The judge in the case eventually determined that there had been enough of this type of fraud in the race that, based on the in-person vote totals, Marks was the rightful winner. More than 20 people would eventually be charged with crimes in relation to the scheme, and many pleaded guilty or were convicted, according to The Inquirer.
Stinson was also charged — although with improperly counting ballots rather than fraud — but was eventually acquitted.
Republicans had their era in Philadelphia politics, too. They dominated 72 years’ worth of presidential contests in the city from 1860 to 1932, controlled nearly all city offices for the better part of five decades, and were the alleged perpetrators of several frauds themselves.
In a 1925 Republican primary for municipal judge, a “glaring debauchery” was committed against Benjamin H. Renshaw, who’d received zero votes out of more than 20,000 that were cast across 25 divisions in the race, according to Inquirer reporting.
The incident was seen as part of the corruption brought on by the political machine of Republican William Vare, a South Philadelphia party boss and U.S. congressman accused of rigging city elections through his control over ward leadership. Vare was backing Renshaw’s opponent.
At one polling place during the 1925 primary, a ward leader offered to credit Renshaw with 50 votes, rather than the actual number he received, telling one of his poll watchers: “You’ll take that or nothing.”
The poll watcher turned down the offer, and the ward leader didn’t budge. Renshaw was credited with zero votes for that polling place.
The political machine “controls the whole process of voting, and practices fraud at every stage,” journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote in his 1903 McClure’s Magazine article “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented.”
Steffens highlights an instance where 252 votes were returned in a division that had fewer than a hundred legal voters. At the time, individual election assessors in each voting district kept their own lists of registered voters and, as Steffens wrote, they would pad those lists with the names of nonexistent people, children, and even dead dogs.
How today's system limits fraud
Much has changed since the era of party bosses and blatant ballot box stuffing.
Following corruption in the 1925 and 1926 elections, political leaders in Harrisburg began more forcefully advocating for change. Gov. Gifford Pinchot and his successor, Gov. John Fisher, pushed for reforms such as allowing citizens to petition to open ballot boxes and have the ballots be recounted if fraud was suspected.
In 1927, a commission was created to study the state’s election law and recommend reforms, and though its work stalled for many years, slowly things began to change.
One of the most significant changes came in 1937, when the state passed the first codified election law in 98 years. The bill did away with the practice of “election assessors” maintaining their own voter lists and centralized the voter registration process. That reform was expanded upon in 2002 with the federal Help America Vote Act, which combined county lists into statewide voter rolls.
Voter lists are now publicly accessible for a nominal fee. Political parties and other organizations can, and do, scrutinize the lists for the kind of fraudulent registrations that Steffens detailed in 1903.
The 1980s brought changes to check the accuracy of vote counts: a statistical audit of 2% of a county’s ballots — or 2,000 if that is less — after each election. The state now does an additional risk-limiting audit on top of that, which is designed to check that there is no fraud on a scale that would alter the outcome of a race.
Modern technology like electronic voter lists and large historical datasets of precinct-level election results allow observers to identify abnormal trends that may indicate fraud.
It was those kinds of changes that allowed Al Schmidt, then a Republican city commissioner, to uncover the Myers scheme. Schmidt, now secretary of the commonwealth, was able to use data on how many ballots were being cast in each precinct to identify discrepancies with the number of voters signing pollbooks at those locations.
Electronic pollbooks recently implemented by the city will make this kind of check even easier.
Lauren Cristella, president of the Philadelphia-based Committee of Seventy, said the fact that instances like the Myers case are being prosecuted is proof “that the system is working.”
The committee — a nonprofit, nonpartisan civil society group focused on improving government — has long been at the forefront of combating election fraud in the city. Its work investigating the 1925 judicial election was instrumental in proving the fraud that led to Renshaw’s loss.
The committee still advocates for reform when it sees mismanagement in Philadelphia government, as recent criticism of the sheriff’s office shows, and Cristella said the group would never shy away from calling out issues at the City Commissioners office when they come up. But nowadays, much of the committee’s work is pushing back against misinformation about the city’s elections.
Defending Philadelphia’s election systems isn’t easy in light of the city’s history, she said. She said she recently had a hard time swaying some family members who were distrustful of the city.
“They were truly asking me, could I, with a straight face, say that elections in Philadelphia were free and fair, safe and secure,” she recounted. “I said ‘To my bones, yes. I believe they are.’ … [But] they're coming with preconceived notions about corruption in Philadelphia and there was almost nothing I could say to convince them otherwise.”
In situations like these, Cristella explains that she knows the people who make the election happen, and has personally seen all of the steps. She also points to the sheer scale of elections in the city as a bulwark against widespread fraud. There are over 1,700 precincts that, when fully staffed, have five workers each, including at least one from each party, and they are open to observers from both parties and all campaigns.
“How many people would have to be in on a conspiracy?” she asked. “I don't believe that more than three people can keep a secret.”
Indeed, after the Stinson-Marks race of 1993, a Democratic committeeman working on Stinson’s campaign, Bill Jones, became a whistleblower for Marks and testified in court about the details of the scheme.
“His testimony was absolutely tremendous,” Marks said.
Cristella argues that fraud is also simply not a productive strategy. Beyond the risk of jail time, she said, there would be little return on investment for a campaign to try to, for instance, identify dead voters still on the voter list and then transport imposters to polling places to cast ballots.
“You can put misinformation on Facebook and probably influence more people,” she said.
Blaming the city serves political ends
On the other hand, making claims about fraud — even without proof or in the face of contradictory evidence — can be politically fruitful.
Seth Bluestein, the lone Republican commissioner on the city’s three-member Board of Elections, said claims “not based on reality” are constantly regurgitated as evidence of purported fraud.
One oft-repeated example is from 2012.
As Trump made his first run for president in 2016, conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity bolstered his fraud claims by pointing to data showing that 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney received zero votes in 59 of the city’s voting divisions, which numbered slightly less than 1,700 at the time.
The explanation was simple, as The Inquirer, political scientists, and Republican city officials pointed out: None of the people in those heavily Black, Democratic divisions had chosen Romney over Barack Obama.
Then-commissioner Schmidt personally went to the districts to try to find Republican voters to make sure none had voted for Romney and been defrauded.
“We didn't find a single one,” he told PBS News in 2016.
That fact didn’t stop Trump allies from recycling the debunked talking point four years later.
“Philadelphia in particular has a history of very peculiar results,” Trump 2020 campaign adviser and former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said on Fox News the day after the 2020 election. “You had … 59 different precincts where Mitt Romney got precisely zero votes, which is very unlikely and curious indeed.”
Jeffrey Carroll, an associate professor of political science at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia, said the fact that the city — the birthplace of the Constitution — occupies a politically important space in a politically important state, and that campaigns can draw from these real examples, make accusing the city of cheating “low-hanging fruit.”
“It's a very effective tool, unfortunately,” he said. “The average voter believes that there is more instances than they actually are, so to beat back that narrative is incredibly difficult.”
Race is also a factor.
Omar Sabir, Democratic chair of the Philadelphia Board of Elections, has long advocated for voters of color in the city, including creating the Octavius Catto Task Force, named after a 19th-century Black civil rights activist who was killed on Election Day in Philadelphia in 1871.
Sabir said the city draws such scrutiny not just because of its outsized influence in statewide elections, but also because it is a majority-minority city. Roughly 60% of Philadelphia’s eligible voters are non-white, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
“When you have a city that’s majority African-American, Latino, Asian voters, you're going to see people want to try to cast doubt, and try to confuse people, and to get them to not have trust in the system,” Sabir said, pointing to similar attacks on Atlanta and Detroit.
A Votebeat analysis of Trump’s 2020 election lawsuits found they disproportionately targeted areas with large Black and Latino populations, including Philadelphia. In his rhetoric, Trump repeatedly blamed cities with predominantly Black communities for his loss, saying two days after Election Day, “Detroit and Philadelphia are known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country — easily,” and his campaign singled out specific Black election workers in its false accusations of cheating.
As Trump disputed his 2020 loss in court, Marks represented him, including in an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court where he argued that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had usurped the state legislature’s authority to set rules on mail ballot voting. Marks — along with California attorney John Eastman, who has been indicted for his role in Trump's scheme to overturn the 2020 election — wrote that the legislature’s concerns about election fraud were “well founded, based on a history of misconduct in Philadelphia.”
As evidence, Marks cited his own 1993 race.
Reflecting on the parallels between his 1993 experience and the language of fraud and cheating Trump has used, Marks said perhaps Trump shouldn’t have used the word “fraud,” and should have spoken instead about how the rules were “unfair,” since he worried Trump wouldn’t have the same concrete evidence to back up a “fraud” allegation as he did.
Marks is still distrustful of the city and its elections, not just because of his case, but also because of other incidents of malfeasance, such as union leader John Dougherty’s conviction for bribery of a City Council member, and dysfunction in the sheriff’s office.
“I think the concern of voter fraud in Philadelphia and the concern of municipal corruption is very real,” he said. “It's evidenced by every two years, a state representative or a state senator or a City Council person being convicted of something.”
Both the Committee of Seventy and the City Commissioners office are now preparing for fraud accusations to emerge again. They’re engaging in community outreach and advertising campaigns to try to explain how the city’s elections operate. Cristella said the committee will be hosting an event in Bucks County with the commissioners in mid-September demonstrating how their voting machines work, and Sabir said the commissioners’ office is hiring a strategic communications firm to help with messaging and responding to misinformation.
Bluestein said the narrative that elections can’t be trusted is not limited to Philadelphia and has grown since 2020. Combating that isn’t easy.
“Even though we have [pre-election machine] testing and we're as transparent as we can be about the counting process, our bully pulpit is never going to be as large as the people who are saying elections can't be trusted,” he said.
And as Trump showed at his Temple University rally in June, he’s not giving up that talking point about Philadelphia.
“They used a lot of things to cheat,” he told his supporters. “But we’re not going to let it happen again. You’re not going to let it happen again.”
Carter Walker is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with Spotlight PA. Contact Carter at cwalker@votebeat.org.