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Even before the polls opened, Bruce Marks knew something wasn’t right.
Two weeks before a 1993 special election for a Pennsylvania state Senate district in Philadelphia, Marks was walking down the street in Center City when he was stopped by a Democratic member of the City Council, who warned Marks that there would be fraud in the race using absentee mail ballots.
Marks, the Republican candidate, dispatched one of his advisers to the City Commissioners office to pull the absentee ballot applications, and the aide reported an unusually high number of them, many filled out with information that raised questions about their legitimacy.
“We're getting all this information that there's something wrong with these absentee ballot applications and there's just gotta be somebody behind it,” Marks recalled during a recent interview.
He was right. There was somebody behind it.
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It was the campaign of his Democratic opponent, William Stinson, which had arranged to have hundreds of voters cast illegitimate absentee ballots. As the scheme unraveled in the ensuing months, the discovery resulted in a judge vacating Stinson’s win and...
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