The recent guilty plea of former U.S. Congressman Michael “Ozzie” Myers to multiple charges of election fraud is yet another example that tampering with elections is real, despite the rhetoric from the left insisting it doesn’t exist, says Ken Cuccinelli, national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative and former Virginia attorney general.
“The false narrative desperately pushed by the left (including so-called mainstream media) that there 'is no voter fraud' has so many examples that it's amazing any of them have the chutzpah to keep saying it,” Cuccinelli wrote in an email to the Philly Leader.
On June 6, the U.S. Attorney’s office released a statement saying that Myers, 79, “pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deprive voters of civil rights, bribery, obstruction of justice, falsification of voting records, and conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election for orchestrating schemes to fraudulently stuff the ballot boxes for specific Democratic candidates in the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018 Pennsylvania elections.”
Myers also admitted to conspiring to commit election fraud with another elections judge, Marie Beren, who pleaded guilty to the scheme in October 2021.
"Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy," U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said in a press release. "If even one vote has been illegally cast or if the integrity of just one election official is compromised, it diminishes faith in process."
In its Election Fraud Database, the Heritage Foundation has what the group’s Senior Legal Fellow Hans von Spakovsky refers to as 1,357 “proven instances of election fraud."
“Again, many on the left dismiss the issue of election fraud and are opposed to all commonsense efforts to improve the security and fairness of the election process, claiming fraud is a myth,” von Spakovsky wrote in a recent commentary posted on the Foundation’s website. “Yet as the following cases show, it is hardly a myth.”
Last June, the Republican-run Pennsylvania General Assembly sent Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, a sweeping election reform bill, which among other provisions, mandated that voters present a photo ID. Wolf vetoed the bill.
Reacting to the Myers case, Jason Thompson, spokesman for Senate President Jake Corman (R-Centre), told the Philly Leader that “this is just another example of the vulnerabilities in our election system and the need for voting to be more secure.”
“Senate Republicans will continue to work in good faith toward solutions that will restore the public’s faith in our elections,” he said.
In 1980, Myers was expelled from the U.S. House for his involvement with the Abscam scandal.
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