Former South Philly elections judge spared prison after conviction for faking votes

A key cooperator in the election fraud case that sent former U.S. Rep. Michael “Ozzie” Myers to prison and exposed a practice of false voting in several South Philadelphia precincts was sentenced Thursday to probation.

Federal prosecutors cited the extensive assistance provided by Marie Beren, 69 — a longtime judge of elections and former staffer for Philadelphia City Councilmember Mark Squilla — as they urged a judge to spare her a prison term.

Though Beren admitted she’d cast dozens of fraudulent votes at Myers’ request across multiple elections in the names of friends and neighbors, her willingness to work with authorities to bring down the former congressman helped ensure he was no longer corrupting elections today, Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric L. Gibson said.

“Myers deserved to be punished,” he told U.S. District Judge Paul S. Diamond at a sentencing hearing Thursday. “And she deserves some recognition for helping to bring down [his] machine in South Philadelphia.”

Beren’s sentence — a three-year term of probation and a $4,000 fine — was the latest development in a case that put Myers back in the news four decades after he was ousted from Congress and last sent to prison amid the Abscam bribery scandal of the 1970s.

Allies of former President Donald Trump have seized upon this latest probe to back their false claims that he lost reelection in 2020 due to cheating in places like heavily Democratic Philadelphia.

But despite the seriousness of the crimes, prosecutors have not alleged that the fake votes Myers caused Beren to cast between 2015 and 2019 were enough to tip the balance in her district — let alone the city — in favor of his preferred candidates.

In fact, the scheme was initially uncovered by city elections administrators after they noticed persistent irregularities in the vote totals in their pocket of South Philadelphia.

Myers was sentenced to 2½ years in prison last year after admitting to influencing poll workers like Beren to add dozens of false votes for candidates he supported in the district he formerly represented.

But while Diamond, the judge overseeing the case, ordered Myers hauled off to prison immediately after sentencing him in September, he struck a much softer tone Thursday when doling out Beren’s punishment.

“In a way, this sentencing was much more about him than it was about [her],” the judge said. “Mr. Myers groomed this defendant from a very early age. He recruited her to politics. Made her judge of elections and was the person who corrupted her.”

As prosecutors told it, it was Myers — a fallen political boss with outsized influence in his neighborhood — who first recruited Beren, a high school dropout, into politics in the 1980s.

First, he encouraged her to run as a Democratic committeeperson in South Philadelphia’s 39th Ward, an area south of Mifflin Street and east of Broad.

Four years later, he pushed her to become judge of elections for one of the ward’s divisions — a job she would hold for nearly the next 30 years.

She eventually landed jobs with the Philadelphia School District and working in constituent services for City Council, most recently for Squilla.

But even after Beren had formally stepped down from her role as election judge in 2015, she continued to enjoy broad influence as what prosecutors described as the de facto administrator of elections in the 39th Ward divisions that used the Seafarers Union Hall at Fourth and Shunk Streets as their polling location.

This allowed her the access to voting machines that Myers needed.

While pleading guilty in 2021, Beren admitted that Myers would drive her to the polling site on election days and advise her which candidates needed an extra push.

In turn, she said, she would steer people at the polls to vote for those candidates or add them herself in the name of registered voters she knew from her years of experience were unlikely to show up to the polls.

Beren also acknowledged letting voters at the polling place cast ballots for relatives who didn’t plan to vote, and she encouraged them to support Myers’ candidates.

And unlike in a neighboring division where Myers was convicted of bribing the judge of elections, Domenick DeMuro, to get him to join his scheme, in Beren’s case, all the former member of Congress had to do was ask.

Beren said Thursday that she’d grown up revering Myers — not only because, as a congressman, he’d taken an active interest in helping her get involved in politics but also because when her son was arrested on drug charges in the 2000s, he’d promised he would take care of it.

He provided a lawyer free of charge, met with then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham to discuss the case, and even arranged for former U.S. Rep. and head of Philadelphia’s Democratic City Committee Bob Brady to vouch for her son at his sentencing.

Beren’s lawyer, Caroline A. Cinquanto, said Thursday that despite those promises, it didn’t appear to her that Beren’s son had received any special treatment in the sentence he ultimately received.

But in Beren’s mind, the attorney said, she owed Myers for his assistance.

“All of this, to Ms. Beren, who was very provincial, made Ozzie a god,” Cinquanto said. “As far as she was concerned, he’d saved her son’s life.”

And yet, when the FBI showed up asking questions about her involvement in Myers’ illegal voting scheme, she confessed and agreed to cooperate almost immediately, Gibson, the prosecutor, told the court.

And unlike in the voting division overseen by DeMuro — where the fake votes immediately jumped out due to his failure to reconcile the number of votes cast on voting machines with the number of voters signed into the logs at his polling location — Beren had been smarter, falsely filling out poll logs in the names of people she’d cast votes for.

Without her assistance and willingness to testify, Gibson said, investigators might not have been able to unravel the extent of Myers’ corruption in the voting divisions she oversaw.

For her part, Beren told the judge she remained deeply ashamed of her role in Myers’ scheme.

“I put my loyalty to Ozzie Myers above my loyalty to the community who elected me,” she said. “Every individual should have the opportunity to vote for the candidates they choose, and I took that away from them.”

And as she left the courtroom Thursday, free from the threat of prison, she paused to give Gibson, the man responsible for her conviction, a hug.