Federal prosecutors have indicted three Pennsylvania Democrats who are accused of changing voter registration information for dozens of people and fraudulently casting mail-in ballots in their names in a failed bid to steal a mayoral election.
The defendants, Md Nurul Hasan, Md Munsur Ali, and Md Rafikul Islam, conspired to help Hasan win the 2021 mayoral election as a write-in candidate in Millbourne Borough, a small municipality west of Philadelphia, according to the indictment filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans across the country made efforts to tighten election security. Democrats and mainstream news outlets said the changes were cruel and largely unnecessary, claiming that voter fraud is rare and that it’s virtually impossible to swing an election through vote rigging. Former President Joe Biden famously took aim at Georgia’s revamped election-security law as akin to “21st-century Jim Crow.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a database and map of more than 1,500 confirmed cases of election fraud dating back to 1982.
The plot to steal the mayoral race in Millbourne was hatched after Hasan, the borough’s vice mayor, lost to now-mayor, Mahabubul Tayub, by 18 votes in the May 2021 Democratic primary, according to the indictment. Millbourne is an overwhelmingly Democratic municipality — no Republican ran for mayor there in 2021. The winner of the primary “was extremely likely to win the general election,” the indictment says.