Authorities have charged Pennsylvania Trump supporter Bruce Bartman with two felony counts of perjury and one count of unlawful voting after he submitted voter registrations on behalf of his mother and mother-in-law, Elizabeth Bartman and Elizabeth Weihman, both of whom are deceased, and subsequently cast an absentee ballot in Bartman’s name. Bruce Bartman, who is 70, filled out the ballot that he attributed to his deceased mother in support of Donald Trump, who lost the state. Bartman’s lawyer Samuel Stretton said that his client “chose to do something stupid” out of “political frustration” and is “very sorry.”
District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer noted that Bartman’s case does not prove the existence of systematic fraud. Stollsteimer observed as follows:
‘For all the conspiracy theorists out there, this case today does not represent widespread voter fraud. This case was evidence that one person committed voter fraud by casting an improper and illegal ballot.’
The very fact that authorities uncovered the crimes confirms the vigor of the system. Similarly, First Assistant District Attorney Tanner Rouse added as follows:
‘In the hundreds of calls we received and the hundreds of visits we made, we only found one instance of malfeasance, and that was Mr. Bartman, and he will be prosecuted.’
In the description of The Philadelphia Inquirer, after the Delaware County Board of Elections received a complaint about the vote in the name of the late Elizabeth Bartman, a “task force of prosecutors, detectives and other officials dedicated to investigating claims of election fraud followed up on the referral and found evidence that a crime had been committed.”
The Trump campaign has alleged that systematic fraud plagued the recently concluded presidential race, but they’ve yet to prove these allegations in a single court case anywhere in the country, and there’s no indication of any legitimate evidence that Trump’s fraud claims are correct. In reality, even outgoing U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr has confirmed that there’s no legitimate evidence of election outcome-altering fraud, and more recently, in a break with Trump, he said that he saw no need for appointing a special counsel to look into supposed fraud. The Attorney General handles special counsel appointments. Reportedly, in a recent White House meeting, Trump floated the prospect of naming conspiracy theory Sidney Powell as a special counsel for fraud-related issues. Powell has pushed ludicrous ideas like the notion that a widely used election management machine company was in cahoots with an election-rigging scheme kickstarted by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, who died 7 years ago.
