Philly political consultant pleads guilty to forging thousands of signatures in 2019 Philadelphia Democratic primary

A Philadelphia political consultant pleaded guilty Thursday to forging thousands of signatures on nomination petitions for candidates who hoped to get on the city’s 2019 Democratic primary ballot.

Rasheen Crews, 46, pleaded guilty to solicitation to commit forgery and theft for forging signatures and paying others to forge signatures in the May Democratic primary that year. He is scheduled to be sentenced in June.

In court Thursday, Crews spoke only in response to questions from Common Pleas Court Judge Rayford Means. Crews, a former deputy in the city’s Register of Wills office, declined to comment outside the courtroom.

Candidates hoping to become judges in Philadelphia Municipal Court and the city’s Court of Common Pleas paid Crews to gather signatures for their petitions, said Senior Deputy Attorney General Thomas Ost-Prisco. Between February and March 2019, Crews paid people — by signature or by the hour — to forge hundreds of signatures, along with forging many himself, the prosecutor said.

The hired workers filled in names and addresses of voters without their knowledge or consent, said Ost-Prisco. They also copied names from voter lists and forged signatures on completed and notarized petitions, according to court records.

In 2020, one of Crews’ attorneys told The Inquirer he was working out arrangements to pay back the candidates he had scammed. But on Thursday, Ost-Prisco said Crews had not returned all of the money the candidates had paid him.

Crews’ scheme threw the 2019 primary season into turmoil.

Former U.S. Rep Bob Brady, chairman of the Democratic City Committee, discovered issues with judicial nomination petitions, some of which he described as “kitchen-table jobs” where people had filled in the names of voters who did not actually sign the petitions. Others, he said, contained what appeared to be photocopied pages from other petitions, which is not allowed.

At the time, Brady said the committee was “panicking,” because Crews had prepared flawed petitions for many of the judicial candidates and several dropped out as a result.

Crews had previously worked gathering petition signatures for high-profile politicians including Mayor Jim Kenney and former Lt. Gov. Mike Stack.

Staff writer Chris Brennan contributed to this article.