During a campaign swing in south-central Pennsylvania last week, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told his supporters to be on the lookout for cheating at the polls on Nov. 8. He claims that if he loses Pennsylvania, it will be because of voter fraud.

Without any specific proof, Trump singled out Philadelphia, a Democratic stronghold, as having the potential for widespread fraud.As Trump made his incendiary comments, he was trailing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by about 9 to 10 percentage points in the latest statewide polls, a significant margin this deep into the campaign.Trump called on volunteers to be poll-watchers. He encouraged law enforcement officers, such as sheriffs, police chiefs and "everybody" to be on the lookout for voter fraud and impersonation.Trump was critical that Pennsylvania's voter identification law was struck down in a court decision in 2014, calling it "shocking" that the law did not stand up to judicial scrutiny.In May 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, the Advancement Project, the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and the Washington, D.C., law firm of Arnold & Porter LLP filed a lawsuit in Commonwealth Court to overturn the voter ID law. The law was permanently blocked in the spring of 2014 after then-Republican Gov. Tom Corbett declined to appeal a federal judge's ruling that the law was unconstitutional.It is revealing that during the voter ID case, the commonwealth admitted that it could not identify even one instance in which a person voted improperly in Pennsylvania by impersonating someone else at the polling place.The ACLU charged during these proceedings that "all evidence points to the fact that the real purpose of the voter ID law is not to ensure the integrity of the electoral process but to ensure political advantage through the exclusion of qualified voters who are perceived to be supporters of the opposition."In 2012, after the General Assembly had passed the voter ID law and Gov. Corbett signed it into law, Republican House Leader Mike Turzai admitted what so many had suspected: Voter identification efforts were meant to suppress Democratic votes in that year's presidential election between Republican Mitt Romney and incumbent Democrat Barack Obama.At that year's Republican State Committee meeting, Turzai let this comment slip: "We are focused on making sure that we meet our obligations that we've talked about for years," Turzai said. Among them, Turzai pointed to voter ID, "which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania." The law never went into effect because of the court challenge, and Romney lost Pennsylvania and the election.In its lawsuit, the ACLU claimed that the voter ID law disproportionately targeted the poor, minorities and students, many of whom tend to favor Democrats.This is not to say that Philadelphia has not had its share of shady election episodes. Just last year, during the Philadelphia primaries, four local election officials were charged with casting extra votes to balance their numbers."There's no legally justifiable reason to vote multiple times, and you cannot falsely certify that you live in a particular ward and division in order to work the polls and collect a check," said District Attorney Seth Williams. "Our democracy rests on free and fair elections, but it also relies on the fact that they are conducted properly, which is why these four individuals deserve to be arrested for what they did."According to Williams, once the polling place closed, the four suspects added six more votes to one of the machines to make the votes cast and sign-in books match, investigators said.But this is not the same as in-person voter fraud, the type that presumably would be detected by a voter ID law.In 2012, 5.5 million presidential ballots were cast in Pennsylvania. There's no evidence, as Trump suggests, that thousands of fraudulent votes were cast - or hundreds, or even a handful.In 2008, 1,500 Philadelphia ballots were sent to the U.S. attorney's office to be investigated. Another 8,000 were deemed to be suspect. No fraud was discovered, and no charges were filed.Examples of widespread in-person voter fraud are rare these days because of stronger polling site safeguards and oversight. In a 2014 study, Loyola University Law School professor Justin Levitt found 31 possible instances of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion ballots cast during a 14-year period (2000-2014). Just one was in Pennsylvania - a man named "Joseph Cheeseboro" and another named "Joseph J. Cheeseborough" each cast a ballot.Still, Trump urged his supporters to be vigilant. "We're going to watch Pennsylvania," he said. "Go down to certain areas and watch and study to make sure other people don't come in and vote five times."Speaking in Altoona, Trump pleaded with his supporters in central and western Pennsylvania to be a counterbalance to the Democrats' dominance in eastern Pennsylvania, especially Philadelphia and its suburbs."The cheating, what they do - we've got to make sure we're doing the job here in central Pennsylvania," Trump told his cheering supporters.Some political observers are concerned that Trump's suggestion, one that he is now taking nationwide, will encourage vigilante citizens to harass voters at polling sites, possibly asking that they prove they are who they say they are. "One of the things that this can do is get rogue people riled up," said Rick Hasen of the University of California at Irvine. "Trump sets the fuse, and lets someone else do the explosion. It strikes me as a very dangerous thing to be suggesting, because it does lend itself to the possibility of violence at the polls," Hasen said.Another of our concerns is that if Trump loses the election, his die-hard supporters will be convinced that the electoral system in Pennsylvania was stacked against their candidate, especially since he told them that if he loses it would be because the election was rigged in favor of "crooked Hillary."By Bruce Frassinelli |

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