A candidate in a contentious race for Pennsylvania state delegate last year found this morning that her name had been purged from the voter rolls at her polling place in Philadelphia. Cheri Honkala, the Green Party write-in candidate in a 2017 special election, said poll workers couldn’t find her name on the official list of voters.
They knew something was amiss, Honkala said, because they all are acquainted with her. “Some were having a heart attack, and others didn’t know what to do,” she said.
Honkala didn’t want to fill out a provisional ballot for fear it wouldn’t be counted. The District Attorney had opened an investigation into a host of allegations of election fraud and intimidation charges stemming from the special election held in March 2017. One finding of the investigation was that many provisional ballots hadn’t been counted.
At her insistence, the poll workers got “the old book” of voter listings from a previous year, Honkala said, confirming her name in it. With her I.D., she was able to vote.
She believes that the disappearance of her name from the voting rolls may have been retribution for campaigning as the Green Party candidate for state delegate in the 197th district in 2017 and competing against Democrat Emilio Vazquez.
The special election to replace State Rep. Leslie Acosta, a Democrat, who resigned after being convicted of a felony embezzlement charge was full of irregularities. To begin with, the Republican candidate was the only name officially on the ballot. A Commonwealth’s Court took the Democratic candidate off the ballot when it determined that he didn’t actually live in the district. His replacement, Emilio Vazquez, didn’t make the deadline for the ballot and had to run as a write-in. Honkala also missed the deadline and ran a write-in campaign. Vazquez won the election.
But Honkala filed a federal lawsuit alleging “massive fraud and misconduct” by election workers on behalf of Vazquez. Among other claims, her campaign alleged that there were ballot boxes at Vazquez’s victory party, votes were handled outside the proper chain of custody, election judges weren’t present at polling places and poll workers asked voters who they voted for. The local and state GOP later joined the lawsuit.
The Philadelphia D.A. and the State Attorney General opened an investigation and, in October, charged four election workers with fraud, interference, voter intimidation and tampering with records. All were convicted.
Honkala is pointing the finger at local Democrats for the disappearance of her name from the voting rolls. “Because Philadelphia is a Democratic Party-controlled city, and I went after the Democratic Party. And because the Feds are now involved in looking at the fraud,” she said.
Honkala is Director of the Poor People’s Economic and Human Rights Campaign and was Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s running mate in the 2012 presidential election.
