When Donald J. Trump asserts that the election will be rigged against him, he and his surrogates frequently single out one city for special scaremongering. “I just hear such reports about Philadelphia,” Mr. Trump has told voters outside the city. He’s heard “horror shows” about stolen votes there. “Everybody,” he’s added, “knows what I’m talking about.” Rudy Giuliani does: “I’d have to be a moron,” he said, to believe Philadelphia elections are fair. Newt Gingrich, too: To dismiss vote theft there, he said, is to deny reality. Philadelphia attracts attention for its place in a swing state. It was where a 2008 news story about two New Black Panthers patrolling a polling place gained mythic proportions. And the city — once home to a mighty Republican political machine — does have a history of corrupt elections dating to the 1970s-era mayor Frank Rizzo. But the most evocative evidence among conspiracy theorists about Philadelphia today turns on a single data point about the 2012 election. There were 59 voting divisions, or precincts, in the city where President Obama swept 100 percent of the vote. The Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, swayed not one soul in these places. A few conservative pundits have called the pattern statistically impossible. Mr. Trump himself has been incredulous: “I mean, like no votes.” There is another, more credible, explanation. “This is definitely more about math than fraud,” said Jeffrey Carroll, an assistant professor of political science at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia who has analyzed those 2012 results. It is math partly of the G.O.P.’s own making. In fact, there are predominantly black pockets in Philadelphia where no one wanted to vote for Mr. Romney. (Officials including the city’s Republican commissioner have looked at the data and today’s hard-to-rig voting machines and concluded the same).
Precincts in Philadelphia, Chicago and other heavily minority cities point to a pair of trends that shouldn’t be mysterious to Republicans: The party has made little effort to court black voters. And a long history of residential segregation — from which Republicans have benefited electorally — has concentrated black voters in these places.
Those suspect voting divisions in Philadelphia contain, on average, several hundred voters and often encompass just a few city blocks. They’re small units. And, in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans by seven to one, in many of these heavily black, lower-income divisions the Democratic advantage is even more stark. Citywide, about a quarter of all voting divisions contain fewer than 20 registered Republicans. In many of the divisions at issue, that number is in the single digits.
It would be fishy, Mr. Carroll said, if Mr. Romney — and John McCain before him — garnered no votes in the precincts where you’d expect to find Republicans. But no one expects to find Republicans in these places.
Full Article: Fraud Claims in Philadelphia? They Add Up to Zero – The New York Times.