Is This Seat Stolen?

By JOHN F. DICKERSON PHILADELPHIA

LYDIA COLON'S MOST PRESSING POLITIcal concern is garbage. A 5-ft. heap of it, piled outside an abandoned row house next door to her home in North Philadelphia, has broken through her chain-link fence. "I would vote 100 times, as long as they come and clean it up," says Colon, a 54-year-old native of Puerto Rico. That may be necessary, since she got no results from the two times she voted in last fall's election.

Colon says she hadn't intended to vote at all, but when a Democratic Party worker came to her door last October asking her to cast a ballot for his party's state senate candidate, Colon showed him the garbage and asked for his help. The visitor assured her that the Democrats would remove the debris if she just signed a form requesting it. She did and was so delighted at the prospect of a clean backyard that she changed her mind and decided to vote. "I was really happy that they were going to clean it up, so I voted Democrat," she says.

What Colon didn't know was that the vote she cast in the booth was her second; the form she had signed to remove the trash was actually an absentee ballot. She was not alone. While state and federal investigators dropped their probes last month into charges of suppression of black voters in New Jersey's gubernatorial race, a voting-fraud scandal roared to life in Pennsylvania. Republicans claim that in a special election last fall to fill a vacancy in the state senate, hundreds of voters in the mostly blue-collar second district of Pennsylvania were tricked into casting absentee ballots that cost the Republicans not only the seat but control of the senate as well.

So hot has the partisan squabbling been that it almost erupted into a fistfight on the floor of the state senate. "Why don't you go back where they steal elections?" snapped Robert Jubelirer, the Republican leader, to Vincent Fumo, a Democratic committee chairman, whose reaction to the comment was so violent a colleague was forced to hold him back. "Get a psychiatrist," the Republican taunted.

With 24 Democrats and 25 Republicans in the senate, the victory for Democrat William Stinson gave his party control through the tie-breaking vote of the Democratic Lieutenant Governor. A victory by the Republican Bruce Marks would + have put his party in power. "This was never about Bruce Marks and Bill Stinson," says Frederick Voight, executive director of the Committee of Seventy, a political-watchdog group. "This was about who controls the state senate. The power and the money. The stakes don't get any higher than that."

What sparked the Republican suspicion was that the victory depended on a large number of absentee ballots. Stinson, a jeweler and beauty-shop owner, won by 461 votes of 40,575 cast. But Marks, a former aide to Senator Arlen Specter, led by 564 votes at the machines. It was Stinson's 1,391-to-366 victory in the absentee ballots that put him over the top.

Marks started to investigate, as did the Philadelphia Inquirer. Since the election, the Inquirer has found 333 Stinson voters who did not obey the law that restricts absentee balloting to those physically unable to get to the polls. Many of the fraudulent ballots were cast by Puerto Rican natives who say they were duped by people offering absentee ballots as "una nueva forma de votar" -- a new way to vote. "She said, 'Sign. I'll do the rest,' " recalls Carmen Silva, 55. "I signed. I didn't know for who or what." Others were encouraged to sign for members of their families. Zoraida Rodriguez voted on behalf of her husband, who was in jail. Nineteen ballots, according to the Inquirer, appear to have been outright forgeries. Among them are those of Rose Fellman and Elpiniki Kousis, residents of Nevada and Greece, respectively, both of whose signatures appear on absentee ballots for Stinson.

The allegations of widespread fraud caught the attention of such prominent Republicans as Newt Gingrich and Specter, who asked the Justice Department to investigate. The Republican National Committee put its lawyers on the case. In late November the Justice Department launched its investigation, joining the criminal probe already under way by the Pennsylvania attorney general's office.

Marks, who dismisses five ballot infractions in his own camp as a misunderstanding, charges Stinson with massive election fraud. Furthermore, Marks says an ensuing "whitewash" involved the state's entire Democratic establishment. "Sadly, Philadelphia has a history of political corruption on the part of the Democrats," says Marks. Stinson denies that he stole the election, and the Democrats have returned fire. "This is bwhen Marks criticizes the courts for good, honest decisions," declares senate majority leader Bill Lincoln.

Meanwhile, next week Marks will be suing Stinson in federal court to overthrow the election results. In the meantime, while Republicans refuse to call him senator, Stinson continues to vote. As for Colon, she declares, "I'll never vote again." And the trash heap next to her backyard continues to grow.