Is there a scheme to engage in widespread voter fraud on Nov. 4 in Pennsylvania to steal the election from John McCain?

That is the claim made in a GOP suit filed Friday.  The state party said that without court intervention the outcome of the election “may be determined by illegal ballots.” Allegations of vote stealing are as old as the Republic and, in recent years, have become a standard Republican pre-election tactic.

Most of the GOP fire is directed at the grassroots organization ACORN, which runs voter registration efforts to sign up poor and minority (read: Democratic) voters.  ACORN gathered 140,000 new registrations in Pennsylvania this election season as part of a nationwide effort.

The Republicans hint that many of these ACORN registrations may be fraudulent, gathered as a prelude to swamping the polls on Election Day with phony voters casting ballots on behalf of Barack Obama.

Before talking about the facts, let’s look at the tactical goal of this campaign.

It is designed primarily to rev up the Republican base by playing on fears that corrupt big-city machine pols and/or radical leftist groups are going to use the blacks to steal the election. No one ever puts it that bluntly, but that is the message behind the message.

Is it effective? I cannot say. But, as Sister Mary Edna demonstrated to me in second grade, fear is a great motivator. She used a ruler.  The Republicans are using a law suit.

The other issue is: is there widespread voter fraud in America?  The answer is no. How do I know? The federal government told me so.

Under the Bush administration, the U.S. Justice Department has been on a campaign to track down and prosecute all cases of vote fraud in America. It was an area the feds had not paid much attention to before, but beginning in 2002 it became a top priority under Attorney General John Ashcroft and his successor, Alberto Gonzales.

The yield was small: 86 convictions over the first five years of the program. Most of them were small-potato cases, involving fewer than 50 votes. Most of them involved races for local offices in small towns where a few dozen votes could swing an election.  Also most of them involved either vote buying (I pay you $20 to vote for me) or absentee ballot fraud (I fill out your absentee ballot form.)

None of them involved voter impersonation - Jim Jones goes into the polling place, pretends he is John Smith and cast a vote.. The Republicans say that ACORN is involved in (deliberately) filing phony registrations so people in on the conspiracy can go to the polls, pretend they are these non-existent voters, and cast fraudulent ballots

ACORN denies this. They say these bad registrations are due to the fact that they pay people to canvas for new voters and some of those folks, instead of walking the streets for 8 hours a day, sometimes simply sit down fill out the forms using phony names and addresses.

This has been a problem for ACORN since it began doing mass registration drives in 2000.  To address it, they have instituted what they call “quality control procedures” – i.e. workers who check incomplete or suspect registration forms.  If a canvasser is found to have submitted phony forms, he is fired – and the case is turned over to the law.

I’m not going to get into a tit-for-tat over whether ACORN is promoting vote fraud (as the Republicans say) or whether it is being defrauded by the people it hires to do these jobs for $8 to $10 an hour (as ACORN says.)

Instead, let’s look at the reality of the situation.

Suppose the purpose was to steal votes. Suppose you were put in charge of the operation.  Your job on Election Day (just to put the shoe on the other foot) would be to get votes in Philadelphia for John McCain.

I don’t mean 10 or 20 or even 100 votes.  That won’t help your candidate in a statewide election where 6 million ballots are likely to be cast. No, your goal is to get 5,000 votes.  How would you do it?

First, you would need a list of these phony voters. But, let’s say you have it. Next, you would have to recruit people to go in, pretend they are who they are not, and cast a vote for McCain. Presumably, you would pay them to do this – say, $20 per phony vote cast.  Total cost: $100,000 – in cash. But, let’s say you have the money.

So, the challenge is: Get 5,000 votes for McCain in Philly, using voter impersonation.  Tell me (a) how you would accomplish it, and (b) how you would do it without getting caught?

The short answer is: it’s nearly impossible. If you recruited 1,000 people to each cast five phony votes, what would happen if some of them were caught and the cops asked them: Who put you up to this? Gulp.  You’d be in trouble

Suppose you made it a smaller, more manageable group of 100 co-conspirators. Each would have to cast 500 votes to make it work.  I don’t think they could get to enough polling place around the city in one day to cast that many votes.

Now you see why voter impersonation isn’t used.  But, I’m willing to be proven wrong.  Send my your suggestions on how you would steal 5,000 votes.

The winner will get an all-expense paid trip to Lewisburg Federal Prison.

Tom Ferrick is a contributing writer for It’s Our City. He is a former columnist and reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Read Tom’s past stories for It’ s Our City.