President Donald Trump’s claims that dead people voted in Pennsylvania turned out to be true, but they didn’t vote for Joe Biden. Prosecutors in Delaware County announced on Monday that they found voter fraud after discovering that a registered Republican cast a ballot for Trump in the name of his deceased mother who died 12 years ago.
Marple Township resident Bruce Bartman, 70, is charged with two counts of perjury, and a count of unlawful voting, authorities said during a press conference.
According to the indictment, 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 said that the mother had passed away 12 years ago and his mother-in-law, Weihman, died in 2019, the DA office said in a statement.
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.
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Donald Trump has long made unsubstantiated claims of widespread, systematic voter fraud, falsely insisting that he actually won the 2020 election by a lot. Many were quick to note this on social media as they learned of Bartman’s alleged confession to using that fraudulent absentee ballot to cast a vote for Trump.
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.
You can watch the news conference and read the announcement below.
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
