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City Commission takes action on absentee ballots ... with an obscure press release!
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
City Commission takes action on absentee ballots ... with an obscure press release!
As my colleague Holly Otterbein has been reporting, the City Commissioners, who supervise elections in Philadelphia, became aware over the weekend of a problem with returned – but properly mailed – absentee ballots. The error was apparently that of the U.S. Postal Service.
How many people have been affected is not known. This morning, Election Supervisor Bill Rubin called it "a minor situation," and said that the City Commissioners had been directly contacted by only 3 or 4 people on Friday and Saturday each. But that number, of course, only represents the number of people who received the returned ballots, noticed them, and bothered to call the City Commission ... over Halloween weekend.
Other than that, the only methods of determining the scope of this problem Rubin mentioned were his observations that the phones weren't "ringing off the hook," and that the Board of Elections had received approximately 50% of the 9,000 absentee ballots it sent out and that that number is "about average."
The Committee of Seventy has urged the City Commissioners to ask the courts for an extension for those whose absentee ballots were returned in error, but the City Commission has so far declined to do so.
Instead, they apparently issued a press release – "apparently," because it's not clear when, where, or to whom this press release was issued. CP obtained a copy via the Committee of Seventy's Ellen Kaplan, who in turn got her copy from the Law Department. Consisting of three sentences and a contact number, the release does not include a contact name, date, or website.
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Asked about the press release, Deputy City Commissioner Fred Voigt said he knew nothing about it: "I don't know," he told CP on the phone. "You'll have to ask somebody else," referring CP to Election Supervisor Bill Rubin.
Voigt then asked what the press release said. CP read it to him.
In fact, the City Commission's election website, phillyelection.com, – long criticized by Seventy for its sparseness – contains neither this release nor any mention at all of the absentee ballot problem.
The information does, however, appear on the front page of the Committee of Seventy's website.
"Given that they have this problem, I would hope they would advertise it in the most conspicuous way – that's what we're doing," said Kaplan over the phone.
A call to Election Supervisor Bill Rubin was not immediately returned, but we'll update as info comes in.
Today (Monday) my son's absentee ballot was delivered to our house. He's away at college, but the P.O. evidently scanned the barcode on the back-- the sticker with his permanent address--rather than the correct barcode on the front. I took it to a Sestak office, and they had someone from the city election commission come pick it up. The city guy said there had been quite a few calls.
Loyal citizens should watch for irregularities in Absentee Ballots and at the Polling Stations.Early registrations are specifically vulnerable to voter fraud, when they are filled-in at a home. Illegal Aliens are certain to take the risk of voting for Senator Reid and the majority of Democrats as its their last great hope for an AMNESTY. Once you break our immigration law, they have nothing to lose? In addition, the SEIU Union in different States has a contract to maintain electronic machines, so how can they be trusted not to manipulate the results for Senator Reid and others, specifically when millions of dollars in Union dues were applied to ad campaigns? Senior Citizens are especially easy targets when arriving to vote, so each voter should carefully check the screens to be positive that they are not voting for the opposite party. This happened in Nevada and although this error was classed as a machine sensitivity issue by polling officers, one cannot take such incidents as a rare mistake. For more information on Voter fraud, just add those prior keywords to Google. Here you will be able to judge for yourself, if these circumstances are infrequent or leading up in some cases to recounts in close races. Liberal extremists will do anything, even violate federal law; to try and alter the outcome of this midterm election?
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