Today District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer announced the filing of criminal charges against Bruce Bartman, 70, of Marple Township for illegally voting in place of his deceased mother in the November 3, 2020 General Election.
Posted by Delaware County District Attorney’s Office on Monday, December 21, 2020
Prosecutors in Pennsylvania announced that they found voter fraud, but it’s not the kind some people have been looking for. A registered Republican cast a ballot for President Donald Trump in the name of his deceased mother, Delaware County authorities say.
Marple Township resident Bruce Bartman, 70, is charged with two counts of perjury, and a count of unlawful voting.
Is this our first documented case of an actual ballot cast in the name of a verified dead person in the Philly region during the 2020 election? Note: The man was caught and charged by authorities. He also cast the fraudulent ballot for Trump. pic.twitter.com/zwCLKbfiUQ
— Jeremy Roebuck (@jeremyrroebuck) December 21, 2020
Officials claim Bartman registered both his mother Elizabeth Bartman and his mother-in-law Elizabeth Weihman via the state’s online voter registration portal. District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer (D) said in a press conference on Monday that the mother had passed away 12 years ago. His office said in a statement that Weihman died in 2019.
The District Attorney said that Bartman used his mother’s driver’s license number, and the last four digits of his mother-in-law’s social security number to register them. He acknowledged the defendant was able to get past this because of “flaws” in the system. The state’s system did not catch the driver’s license number as belonging to a dead person, according to this story. The system did flag Weihman’s social security number as possibly belonging to a dead person, the DA said. In a process following federal law, a letter was sent asking to confirm if the information was correct, Stollsteimer said. Bartman allegedly signed the letter to confirm the information was correct, and sent it back to the Delaware County Bureau of Elections, where it “overrode” the social security flag.
According to officials, Bartman made an online request for an absentee ballot in his mother’s name, and sent that ballot in, where it arrived at the Bureau of Elections on Oct. 28. It was counted in the Nov. 3 general election, they said.
President Donald Trump has long made unsubstantiated claims of widespread, systematic voter fraud by Democrats—even before he took office. That continues to this day as he falsely insists that he actually won the 2020 election by a lot. Many were quick to mention Trump’s relentless attacks on mail-in voting as they learned of Bartman’s alleged confession to using a fraudulent absentee ballot to cast a vote for Trump. Others pointed to debunked and false right-wing allegations of dead people voting elsewhere.
Stollsteimer described the incident as isolated, and said he only mentioned that this was a pro-Trump vote because of “all of the controversy” surrounding the 2020 presidential election.
“We are not prosecuting this case because of who he voted for,” he said. “The team of investigators and prosecutors you see here are mixed, both Republicans and Democrats. It matters not a whit to us who he voted for. If he had voted for Joe Biden, or if he had written in Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse, we would still be prosecuting this case because this is a violation of the integrity of the American electoral process.”
It is unclear if Bartman has an attorney of record in this matter.
[Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images]
