District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office is looking into a potentially illegal hidden-camera video of a Philly election worker that a right-wing political group posted on social media, Krasner said this morning.
The DA’s office also helped resolve a dispute this morning over poll monitors who were trying to inspect voting machines and some other minor dust-ups at voting locations, he said.
The political provocateur James O’Keefe posted a two-minute video on X and other sites yesterday which purports to show a City Commissioner employee answering questions about the identification information that is required to register to vote. The employee is standing outside one of the city’s satellite election offices on North 5th Street.
O’Keefe’s post claims the employee “stated that non-citizens can vote in local elections as long as they are residents of Philadelphia.” However the video, which appears to have been taken surreptitiously, does not show the employee saying anything about citizenship.
At a press conference on election security, Krasner said he was aware of “the illegal use, or potentially illegal use, of recording equipment in certain contexts, something that we are not going to allow.”
“We are monitoring this situation closely,” said Matthew Stiegler, an attorney in Krasner’s office. “Criminal violations that interfere with voting, including violations of Pennsylvania’s Wiretap Act and its election interference law, will not be tolerated.”
It’s not clear when O’Keefe took the video, which also shows a small get-out-the-vote event sponsored by a Latino community organization happening across the street from the satellite election office. O’Keefe says the organization was handing out literature saying people could register to vote just by using their ITIN, a number the IRS provides non-citizens for tax payment purposes.
O’Keefe has assembled a group of election workers and poll monitors to secretly film voting and ballot counting across the country, in an effort to document fraud and corruption, the New York Times reported Sunday. O’Keefe has said his activities are legal and he plans to publish an “avalanche” of recordings.
“Hidden camera recording of election workers and voters and poll workers, that’s not normal,” Stiegler said. “That’s not something that we’ve seen in the past. So if that’s occurring, then that’s a significant escalation of what’s happened in the past.”
Early-morning mixups at some polling places
Assistant District Attorney Brian Collins said during the press conference that the office’s Election Task Force hotline received “several dozen calls” this morning about polling place issues, and had sent staff to at least two locations, but that no arrests have been made.
“Passions are running high. Obviously, it’s a tightly contested election, so folks from both sides have been calling us with various issues and concerns,” Collins said.
One dispute happened at William C. Longstreth School in Kingsessing, which is being used as a polling place, Krasner said.
Two poll monitors “were insisting on going to the back of voting booths, and they claimed it was for the purpose of recording serial numbers on those voting booths,” he said. “Other poll workers were not comfortable with that. [The two people] were asked to leave.”
An attorney and a detective from the DA’s office went to the school on Willows Avenue and determined the two people were properly credentialed as poll workers, Krasner said. Shortly after they were asked to leave, they were readmitted to the site, he said.
At a couple other polling sites, people advocating for candidates or handing out campaign literature were improperly blocking the entrances, Collins said. Staff from the DA office explained a rule requiring them to stand 10 feet away from the entrances, and the problems were resolved “amicably,” he said.
Some of the calls also arose from uncertainty about who was supposed to be working as a poll worker early Tuesday morning, Collins said.
Before every Philadelphia election, a court appoints workers to fill vacant positions, and last month an unusually large number of Republican workers were appointed to serve as minority inspectors or in other jobs. Some longtime election workers said they were worried the last-minute hirings could lead to chaos on Election Day.
“There was some confusion about which of the poll workers were supposed to be seated to actually run the polling locations this morning,” Collins said.
The DA and city election officials acted to make sure appointees were being seated this morning, “checking to make sure that the appropriate orders were in place and that their identifications matched who they were supposed to be,” he said. “As far as I’m aware, all those situations have been resolved.”
A profane challenge to would-be election interferers
Krasner and the other speakers stressed that residents should know that voting is safe and secure in Philadelphia, there is no evidence of fraudulent voting, and people should report any intimidation or other problems they witness. The Election Task Force Hotline number is 215-686-9641.
“We do not have any serious indication of voter fraud. We do not expect to have it, but if it’s there, we want to know about it. We don’t want to hear a bunch of crazy fiction later about how things happened,” he said. “If we start to hear about it at 9 o’clock after the polls are closed, you should be rightly suspicious of what you are hearing.”
Krasner said he had been surprised at the national attention he was getting for saying Monday that anyone who planned on trying to intimidate voters can “F around and find out.”
He invited up assistant district attorney Yaa McNeil, who was wearing an Election Task Force T-shirt printed with the letters “FAFO,” styled in the shape of a home protection shield.
He recalled, as he often does, the case of two armed men who drove from Virginia to Philly in 2020 and threatened to interrupt the vote count in the presidential election. They were convicted on gun charges and sentenced to prison terms.
“Anybody who tries to mess with this election, intimidate, bully, anybody who tries to do that, F around and find out, we absolutely will follow through with what we said yesterday,” Krasner said.
“There are handcuffs, there are cells, there are courtrooms, and there are Philadelphia jurors who are definitely going to want to know why it is a person tried to erase their votes, block their votes, bully their votes, or take away their votes,” he added.
