Federal prosecutors have indicted three Pennsylvania Democrats who are accused of changing voter registration information for dozens of people and fraudulently casting mail-in ballots in their names in a failed bid to steal a mayoral election.
The defendants, Md Nurul Hasan, Md Munsur Ali, and Md Rafikul Islam, conspired to help Hasan win the 2021 mayoral election as a write-in candidate in Millbourne Borough, a small municipality west of Philadelphia, according to the indictment filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
The men successfully changed voter registration information for about three dozen people in Delaware County and used it to cast fraudulent ballots for Hasan, the indictment alleges. But it wasn’t enough — Hasan lost the election to another Democrat, Mahabubul Tayub, by 27 votes, according to Delaware County election results.
Attempts to reach Hasan and Ali for comment were unsuccessful. Robert Keller, a lawyer for Islam, said that even according to the indictment his client is “the least culpable” of the three named defendants and that Islam is only accused of aiding in the scheme “in a minor way.” He said Islam has agreed to turn himself in to the court.
“He has no prior record. He’s a U.S. citizen. He’s lived an honorable life and we’re going to do everything we can to protect his interests and see what kind of case the government has, and then act accordingly,” Keller said.
In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Republicans across the country made efforts to tighten election security. Democrats and mainstream news outlets said the changes were cruel and largely unnecessary, claiming that voter fraud is rare and that it’s virtually impossible to swing an election through vote rigging. Former President Joe Biden famously took aim at Georgia’s revamped election-security law as akin to “21st-century Jim Crow.”
The conservative Heritage Foundation maintains a database and map of more than 1,500 confirmed cases of election fraud dating back to 1982.
The plot to steal the mayoral race in Millbourne was hatched after Hasan, the borough’s vice mayor, lost to now-mayor, Mahabubul Tayub, by 18 votes in the May 2021 Democratic primary, according to the indictment. Millbourne is an overwhelmingly Democratic municipality — no Republican ran for mayor there in 2021. The winner of the primary “was extremely likely to win the general election,” the indictment says.
After losing his primary, Hasan decided to run as a write-in candidate for mayor. Ali and Islam, who were both members of the borough’s council at the time, agreed to support him, according to the indictment. Islam lost his re-election bid in 2021.
There are only about 1,200 people in Millbourne. At the time of the May primary there were “approximately 549 registered voters” in the borough, the indictment states. But by the November election, the voter rolls had grown to about 578 voters.
“Most of the additional registered voters were people who did not live in Millboume and had previously been registered to vote in locations outside of Millbourne, but whose voter registration addresses had been changed to Millbourne addresses by someone accessing the [county’s voter registration] website,” the indictment states.
According to prosecutors, Hasan, Ali, and Islam conspired to obtain personal information for non-Milbourne residents and use it to access the county’s voter website and to change the addresses of those residents to locations in the borough. They then requested mail-in or absentee ballots for those residents and used them to cast bogus votes for Hasan.
In some cases, Hasan and Ali reached out to friends and acquaintances outside of Millbourne and got their permission to register to vote in Millbourne for Hasan, prosecutors allege. During their conversations, Hasan and Ali told the non-Millbourne residents “that they would not get in trouble as long as they did not vote in another election in November 2021,” according to the indictment.
In all, Hasan, Ali, and Islam are accused of falsely registering nearly three dozen non-Millbourne residents as Millbourne voters. The indictment lists 15 voters who have been identified by the government — referred to as Person A, Person B, etc. — who live in the nearby communities of Upper Derby, Drexel Hill, Havertown, and Philadelphia.
Hasan received 138 votes in the election, losing to Tayub who received 165.
According to Millbourne’s website, the borough “holds the distinction of having the most concentrated South Asian population in the entire United States.”
National Review has reached out to Delaware County about its election security and if officials are now exploring options to prevent voter fraud in the future.
Jim Allen, the county’s elections director, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the indictments of Hasan, Ali, and Islam should serve as a deterrent to others who may consider engaging in voter fraud, which he called “exceedingly rare.”
“I view this as evidence that investigators are not going to let the passage of time or the lack of an impact on the election result prevent them from pursuing the case, however long it takes,” Allen told the paper.