South Philadelphia ward leader Billy Lanzilotti was voted out of office by other city GOP officials Saturday after he was found to have diverted dozens of mail-in ballots to a PO box registered to a PAC he controls, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. Lanzilotti, GOP boss of the 39th Ward was running to lead the neighboring 26th Ward, as it is permitted by the city Republican Party’s rules for bosses to lead multiple wards at the same time, had apparently schemed to forge ballots for voters in the 26th and get himself elected, showing Trump was right about corrupt elections in Philly.
Never mind the GOP hypocrisy on election fraud, we’ve been through it dozens of times now. What we want to highlight instead here is how local elections, especially in blue collar cities still dominated by early 20th Century style “machine politics” and even more especially in races for posts within those machines that aren’t even public offices like “ward leaders”, by nature are rife with all sorts of bullshit like this due to low turnout, low media interest, and the insular nature of the institutions in play – for both parties. Breitbart isn’t lying when they scream that some corrupt Dem’s ballot harvesting scam vitiated a city council election in Patterson, New Jersey, they’re just full of shit when they imply it’s supposed to have some implication on a national scale.
Of course some asshole ward boss is going to try and almost succeed at rigging a local intra-party election for himself, because it’s the middle of May and (normally) nobody’s paying attention. If anything corrupt local officials are probably more likely to run November state and national elections even cleaner than other jurisdictions would because screwing around would invite scrutiny onto the non-November elections they do fuck around with. It takes a complete dipshit to think that a crooked local Dem cares more about Biden winning than he does collecting bribes.
