Ah, Delaware County and its Republican Committee, Republican Council, Republican judges, and Republican rules. Now is maybe the time to briefly relate the tale of the 1984 election. That year of course Mondale was facing off against Reagan, and had his keister utterly kicked. He won only Minnesota and DC, and the many hundreds of hours I spent on the campaign that fall were utterly wasted as we fell a couple of percentage points short of carrying PA. We also had a hot local congressional race that year, incumbent Congressman-Methodist minister Bob Edgar (who ran and lost for the Senate in 1986) vs. Curt Weldon (odious 10-term Congressman finally put out to pasture by Joe Sestak in 2006.)
Edgar had been swept into office in the class of 1974, and was so utterly reasonable that he continued to get re-elected during the intervening years by the predominently Republican -- VERY Republican -- towns of Delaware County. This infuriated the local machine, which was known as being very powerful and quite corrupt on all levels. There were a variety of tactics employed to oust Edgar in '84 and put in Weldon, including (drum roll) voter disenfranchisement. The same tactics being used in Virginia and Montana this year, in fact: disqualifying student voters (on election day) on the grounds that they weren't registered at their "correct" address, if they had changed dorm rooms -- dorm rooms, not just dorms -- since they registered. This ended up disqualifying several hundred voters at Swarthmore College, and the only recourse was to request an emergency hearing at the county courthouse in Media. We had something on the order of 2 cars to take people there, at the same time we were supposed to be taking voters to the polls. I wasn't a part of any of the hearings but I heard horror stories second-hand about the judge obviously being in the tank. And of course once the polls closed, your chance at getting a hearing faded to nothing, since it was then a moot point. Of the several hundred disqualified voters, only 5 or 6 got to cast ballots.
Did it work? Nearly so. Edgar won, by only a few hundred votes, with I'm sure other dirty votes from other parts of the CD going to Weldon. The damage may have been done, though, as Weldon won office easily in '86 when Edgar ran for Senate. (I have hard memories about all this, but I will say one side effect of the '84 election was I met my wife, but that's a different story.)
In any event, I spotted this report by the Philadelphia Inquirer -- shot in front of the very courthouse where we had the emergency hearings, in Media, in 1984 -- and I shuddered with flashbacks. Note the interviews with voters...the more things change...
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