Jan 6, 2017 3 min read

U.S. Rep. Tim Murphy was sworn in for his eighth term as a representative for the 18th Congressional District Jan. 3. The Republican’s ticket was stamped for another two years on Capitol Hill in November, when he faced no opposition from Democrats, independents, libertarians, vegetarians or anyone else.

It was a repeat of 2014, when Murphy went back to Washington, D.C., after facing no opponent in the primary or general election. Is it indicative of Murphy’s skill as a politician? Sure. In 2012, the last time he faced an opponent, he easily vanquished Larry Maggi, a well-liked and conservative Democrat who has been a Washington County commissioner for more than a decade and was the county’s sheriff before then.

Barring any cataclysmic developments, Murphy will probably be able to occupy the seat that represents the South Hills of Pittsburgh, along with most of Washington, Greene and Westmoreland counties, for as long as he wants.

Murphy is hardly alone, however.

Plenty of other incumbents across the map from both parties were returned to Congress with no opposition at all or, at the very least, no serious opposition. Of 393 House incumbents seeking re-election in 2016, 380 won. That’s an incumbent re-election rate of almost 97 percent.

A good many of them are in districts expressly tailored by state legislators to perpetuate one-party dominance. Pennsylvania’s meticulously gerrymandered districts are part of the reason the commonwealth was deemed a “partly free democracy” in a report released last month by the Electoral Integrity Project, which is based at Harvard and the University of Sydney in Australia, and studies the durability of elections both here and around the world.

Among the 50 states and the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania ranked 45th on the list, with only Arizona, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Mississippi and South Carolina scoring worse.

The top five states on the Electoral Integrity’s Project’s tally, were Vermont, Idaho, New Hampshire, Iowa and New Mexico.

Gerrymandering is a prime reason why the commonwealth was given such poor grades, along with the fact that there’s no requirement that a paper trail be provided from touch-screen voting machines and that rules regarding voter challenges and poll watchers – a point of serious contention before the November vote – are ill-defined. In fact, according to the study, only Wisconsin and North Carolina were given worse scores on gerrymandering, and both states have faced legal challenges to their district lines.

Another point to keep in mind: When district lines guarantee one-party rule, incumbents sometimes face primary challenges from zealots who promise to bring a more pungent version of the party orthodoxy to voters, pushing both parties to their extremes.

Both before and after the 2016 election, accusations of voter fraud were hurled around, and officials found virtually none.

The report by the Election Integrity Project indicates that there are problems with elections in both Pennsylvania and the United States, but hordes of fraudulent voters is not one of them.