Keystone Today

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has charged a former campaign consultant with “wide scale” forgery of voter ballots.

The announcement of the arrest of Rasheen Crews, a Philadelphia political consultant, was posted on the AG’s website on Nov. 16 – over a week after Shapiro, a Democrat, was elected to serve as the Commonwealth's next governor.

Attorney General Josh Shapiro | Attorney General Josh Shapiro/Facebook

Shapiro’s office did not return a request for comment on the timing of the announcement of the arrest in the case that the AG’s statement said was three years in the making. Shapiro has regularly dismissed Republican claims of voter fraud.

“Isn't it interesting how one of the Dems who is part of the ‘there's no election fraud’ yammering, has just gone after one of his own (after the election, of course) for wide spread election fraud,” Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and former Virginia attorney general, wrote in an email to Keystone Today.

In the statement on the arrest, Shapiro, said that “interfering with the integrity of our elections is a serious crime. By soliciting and organizing the wide scale forgery of signatures, the defendant undermined the democratic process and Philadelphians’ right to a free and fair election.”

Multiple candidates allegedly hired Crews to help in getting the required signatures on nominating petitions.

“Crews recruited individuals to help with the petition work, bringing them to a hotel room and asking them to write names, addresses, and forged signatures on multiple petitions. Crews then had these petitions notarized and filed with the Pennsylvania Department of State on behalf of his clients,” the statement said.

Over 1,000 signatures were determined to be duplicates.

In 2016, Shapiro’s attorney general campaign paid Crews $2,000 in 2016, according to a report by the Washington Free Beacon, which cited the Pennsylvania campaign finance database.

In another recent Philadelphia fraud voter case, former Philadelphia Congressman Michael “Ozzie” Myers, 79, was sentenced in September to 30 months in prison.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Myers conspired “to illegally vote in a federal election, and for orchestrating schemes to fraudulently stuff the ballot boxes for specific Democratic candidates in the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Pennsylvania elections.”

Democrats have a history of claiming election fraud in Republicans victories but not Democratic ones, the Republican National Committee reports. 

Democrats supported election reform legislation on the federal level, H.R. 1 and H.R. 4, that would federalize the nation's elections, but opposed election reform laws on the state level increasing voter access and targeting voter fraud-- reforms including voter ID and the removal of deceased voters from the ballot. Georgia, for instance, approved a sweeping election reform bill in 2021, and Biden's Department of Justice sued charging that the laws was intended to suppress the vote. Georgia had an unprecedented turnout in the midterms. 

The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of voter fraud  cases.