The 2000 Florida election debacle led many
Americans to worry about the integrity of our voting system. They're right to
worry: the system is haphazard and sloppy. How sloppy? Well, at least eight of
the 19 foreign-national September 11 hijackers had registered to vote in either
Florida or Virginia.
Election fraud is
expanding. This past March, in just one of many recent cases, Texas
representative Ciro Rodriguez, chairman of the congressional Hispanic Caucus,
lost a close Democratic primary after a missing ballot box suddenly showed up
in South Texas, stuffed with votes for his opponent. Rodriguez charged fraud
but could never definitively prove it.
The circumstances were
eerily similar to those that tipped a 1948 Senate race to Lyndon Johnson.
Election officials found ballot box 13 several days after the election. It held
203 votes, all but one for LBJ. Amazingly enough, the voters had cast their
ballots in alphabetical order.
With nearly 10 percent
of Americans now believing that the election system doesn't count their votes
accurately, and with new charges of fraud beginning to swirl around the 2004
presidential election, it's worth taking a look back at the nation's long
tradition of electoral shenanigans. It's comic—until you start to wonder just
how much of it is still going on.
Nowhere did voter fraud have a more notorious
record than in Tammany-era New York. Tammany Hall's ruthless efficiency in
manufacturing votes especially during the zenith of its power in the second
half of the nineteenth century is legendary. At the time, America didn't yet
have privacy-protecting voting machines or official government ballots, so
Tammany fixers could ensure that voters would cast ballots as promised. Vote
riggers would simply give people pre-marked ballots and watch as they deposited
them into the voting box.
Practical Tammany pols
preferred to deal with "strikers"—wholesale operatives who would
guarantee thick bundles of votes, for a price. One New York candidate who
hadn't yet paid his strikers made the mistake of visiting the polls on Election
Day. The angry operatives swiftly surrounded him, demanding their cash.
Historian Mark Summers recounts that "the politician was nearly torn to
pieces . . . and as he fled the pack cursed him for 'a mean cuss' and emptied
out the ballot-boxes, tearing up every ticket bearing his name."
The immigrants flooding
into New York were easy prey for the Tammany pols. Each state then set its own
standards for naturalizing new citizens, and New York's were lax. In
1868, The Nation reported that Tammany Hall had set up a
"naturalization mill," instantly certifying folks right off the boat
as citizens—and Tammany voters. (In 1996, the Clinton administration similarly
sped up the naturalization of up to 1 million new citizens so that they could
vote in time for that year's election.)
Tammany was so efficient
at election fixing that between 1868 and 1871, the votes cast in the city
totaled 8 percent more than the entire voting population—"the dead filling
in for the sick," as one contemporary wag put it. Historian Denis Tilden
Lynch describes how thugs would go from one polling place to the next,
impersonating citizens who hadn't yet voted. One such "repeater"
posed as the dignified pastor of a Dutch Reformed church. The election clerks
asked him his name.
"Jones,"
shouted the repeater, startling the poll workers with his scraggly beard,
unclean face, and whiskey breath.
"What is the first
name, Mr. Jones?" asked the election clerk.
"John,"
snarled the repeater.
"The Reverend Dr.
John Jones, pastor of the Dutch Reformed church around the corner?" asked
a clerk.
"Yes, you dirty,
lousy @$#%%^^**!" exclaimed the repeater. "Who'n else did you thick I
was, eh?"
The officials let
"Reverend Jones" vote.
After his fall from power, the infamous Tammany
Hall leader William Marcy Tweed—Boss Tweed—candidly assessed the conduct of
elections in his city. His 1877 testimony before the New York Board of Aldermen
remains fascinating for its matter-of-fact explication of how to corrupt
democracy:
Q: "When you were
in office, did the [Tweed] Ring control the elections in the city at that
time?"
A: "They did sir.
Absolutely."
Q: "Please tell me
what the modus operandi of that was. How did you control the elections?"
A: "Well, each ward
had a representative man, who would control matters in his own ward, and whom
the various members of the general committee were to look up to for advice how
to control the elections."
Q: "What were they
to do, in case you wanted a particular man elected over another?"
A: "Count the
ballots in bulk, or without counting them announce the result in bulk, or
change from one to the other, as the case may have been."
Q: "Then these
elections really were no elections at all? The ballots were made to bring about
any result that you determined upon beforehand?"
A: "The ballots
made no result; the counters made the result. That was generally done to every
ward by the gentleman who had charge of the ward."
Q: "Mr. Tweed, did
you ever give any directions to any persons, to falsify or change the result of
the actual bona fide ballots cast in any election?"
A. "More in the
nature of a request than a directive."
Later in Tweed's
testimony, this exchange occurred:
Q: "Can you state
now, at this time, whether the election which took place in the City of New
York at that time [1868] was a fair and honest election?"
A: "I have not the
details in my memory."
Q: "What is your
best impression?"
A: "I don't think
there was ever a fair or honest election in the City of New York."
Tammany's fraud was so
all-encompassing, says historian Mark Summers, that "even men who have
passed through history with clean reputations thought little of raising a
majority that way." Henry Raymond, co-founder and first editor of
the New York Times, railed against corruption. But when he
ran for speaker of the New York State Assembly in 1851, he asked Senator
Hamilton Fish for $1,000, so that he could buy the election. "Truly a
pretty suggestion," Fish confided to his diary, "but corruption in connection
with these primary elections has become so prevalent that one loses
astonishment at its evidence in any quarter."
Boss Tweed died in disgrace, but Tammany Hall
flourished into the twentieth century. In 1905, William Randolph Hearst, owner
of the New York Morning Journal, decided to take Tammany on and run for New
York mayor on the ticket of his own third party, the Municipal Ownership
League. Hearst had already beaten a Tammany-backed candidate in 1902, winning a
New York congressional seat with a lavish campaign that would have put New
Jersey senator Jon Corzine to shame. Hearst spent the equivalent of $100,000
for fireworks in Madison Square Park and offered free trips to Coney Island for
every man, woman, and child in his district.
But Hearst bit off more
than he could buy in running for mayor—a key position in the Tammany empire. On
election day, notes Hearst biographer David Nasaw, "there were instances
of voter fraud, of poll watchers being chased away, of delays in reporting
returns, of unopened and uncounted ballot boxes mysteriously turning up in the
East River." The New York Independent declared
it "the most extraordinary election ever witnessed in New York
City"—and that's saying something. The New York Times reported
that the challenger's poll watchers, having been beaten up and driven off by
Tammany goons, "came into the Hearst headquarters last night with bandaged
hands. Some carried their arms in slings. At about ten o'clock in the evening a
report was received that the returns were being held back from these
districts"—presumably as Tammany stuffed the ballot boxes to achieve the
desired count. One poll watcher, an R. Little, "had a finger chewed off
and his face cut."
While the newspapers
deplored the violence, they also expressed relief that incumbent Tammany mayor
George Brinton McClellan beat Hearst, by a margin of 3,472 votes out of more
than 600,000 "cast." The New York Times congratulated
city voters for having "spared the city the humiliation, the trials, and
the dangers of a four years' mismanagement of its affairs by a peculiarly
reckless, unschooled, and unsteady group of experimenters and
adventurers."
Hearst believed that he
had won the election as ballots went into the boxes but lost it as they came
out. After organizing a blue-ribbon committee to protest the fraud and demand a
recount, he held massive demonstrations throughout the city and went to court.
But the courts and the state legislature ignored him, and no recount took
place.
New York City's corruption, severe as it was, was
far from unique. In Baltimore, for instance, vote fixing could get even uglier:
a notorious Whig Party organization, the "Fourth Ward Club," hired
thugs to seize innocent strangers and foreigners, drug them with bad whiskey
and opiates, and send them out to cast multiple votes. (James Harrison, a
biographer of Edgar Allan Poe, speculates that when Poe died in 1849, he was a
victim of ruthless vote-fraud toughs who kidnapped him and left him drunk and
near death on a Baltimore street.) Political scientists estimate that in many
urban areas, fixers routinely manipulated 10 to 15 percent of the vote. A 1929
study by the Brookings Institution, looking back on U.S. elections in the
nineteenth century, observed: "[I]ndifference, fraud, corruption, and
violence have marked the operation of our electoral system."
The corruption
influenced national as well as local politics.
Both major parties stole
votes with abandon in the 1876 presidential election between Republican
Rutherford Hayes of Ohio and Samuel Tilden of New York. The race ended in a
deadlock, resolved only after a congressionally created commission delivered
the presidency to Hayes by a single, disputed electoral vote. At least three
other presidential elections—in 1880, 1884, and 1888—proved so close that fraud
may have played a role in their outcomes, too.
As the century closed,
however, fraud gradually began to diminish, as popular disgust with vote
rigging spurred reforms. States began to require voters to register before
Election Day. In Massachusetts, Richard Henry Dana III, son of the author of
the classic Two Years Before the Mast,
persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to adopt the "Australian"
ballot—a government-printed ballot that would list all candidates and that
voters would cast in secret in a booth. It became a model for reformers
elsewhere. As changes spread to other states, voter "turnout" fell
precipitously. Historians Gary Cox and Morgan Krause point out that turnout in
New York State elections dropped some 15 percent after the anti-fraud measures
took effect.
Voter fraud didn't vanish from American politics,
of course—jokes still circulate about the late Chicago mayor Richard Daley's
uncanny ability to get the dead to vote for him. But first prize for twentieth-century
electoral corruption goes to Mayor Frank "I Am the Law" Hague, whose
political machine controlled gritty Jersey City, New Jersey, across the Hudson
River from New York, from 1917 to 1947. His desk had a special drawer that opened
in the front, allowing visitors to deposit bribes that then disappeared inside
the desk. On a yearly salary of $8,000, he amassed a fortune of at least $10
million.
Hague's career began
inauspiciously, as you might expect. Expelled from school after sixth grade as
incorrigible, he became a ward heeler for the Jersey City Democratic machine.
In 1908, he entered city employment as a janitor. Ten years later, he was
mayor, and, through his control of the Hudson County vote, the leader of the
state Democratic Party and the man who could dictate who would become governor
or a judge. In 1939, so great was Hague's power that he could order his
handpicked governor to appoint his son, Frank Hague Jr., to the state supreme
court, even though the young man had never graduated from law school.
The Hague machine turned
voter fraud into a science. On the Sunday before an election, the mayor would
gather his ward heelers into a Jersey City arena (called the Grotto) and give
his orders. "Three hundred and sixty-four days a year you come to me
wanting favors. . . . Now, one day in the year I come to you." Hague
fielded roughly one worker per 100 voters, and boy, did he get results. In
1937, the Democratic candidate in the First District of the First Ward won 433
votes, the Republican only one. This struck some people as odd, since a short
time earlier, the district had recorded 103 Republican votes. An investigation
found torn ballots, others with unmistakable erasure marks, and yet others
altered by pencil. The single Republican ballot, marked with a red pencil,
"could not have been erased without doing definite damage to the
ballot," investigators noted.
Reformers were always
trying to clean up Jersey City elections, but they faced an uphill fight. In
1935, the Honest Ballot Association sent 245 Princeton students to monitor a
city election. Hague's ruffians beat up five of them within an hour of their
arrival. Several others, ejected from a polling place, went to see the mayor to
protest. "Well, you fellows go back there if you wish, but if you get
knocked cold it will be your own hard luck," he told them. Later, Hague
explained to Collier's magazine that the
roughing-up involved "[a]nimal spirits, that's all. I told my boys to lay
off, but it was a pretty dull election, and they couldn't resist the temptation
to have a little fun."
In 1937, the Jersey Journal asked in a disgusted editorial:
"Where was Election Superintendent Ferguson's 1,300 deputies when the new
irregularities now charged occurred last Tuesday?" In response, the superintendent
issued a public statement that read, in part: "Where were my deputies?
Some of them were locked up in the police stations; some were stuck on corners,
with a threat that if they moved from them, a night stick would be wrapped
around their necks. . . . The only way to have an honest election in Hudson
County under present conditions is with the militia."
Mayor Hague retired from
office in 1947, turning over the job of mayor to his nephew. Gradually, his
machine lost control of the city, though Jersey's politics remain far from
pristine to this day. Nevertheless, Hague's flagrant vote rigging was extreme
for post-Tammany American politics.
Yet if Hague's ghost, or Boss Tweed's, took a
look at a recent newspaper, he'd smile in recognition. Wholesale vote fraud is
on the rise again, almost all of it trying to elect Democratic candidates. The
reason that the cheating is happening overwhelmingly among the Dems these days
may have something to do with who supports the respective parties, say Larry Sabato
and Glenn Simpson in their book Dirty Little Secrets.
Republican voters tend to be middle class and not easily tempted to commit
fraud, while "the pool of people who appear to be available and more
vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean
Democratic." Most incidents of wide-scale fraud, agrees Paul Harrison,
director of the Center for American Politics at the University of Maryland,
"reportedly occur in inner cities."
Barely a day has gone by
in the run-up to the 2004 election without another outrageous story hitting the
headlines. In Lansing, Michigan, the city clerk's office complained in late
September about 5,000 to 8,000 fraudulent voter-registration forms that had
recently come in—courtesy, election officials believed, of the Public Interest
Research Group, a liberal advocacy outfit.
In Racine, Wisconsin,
around the same time, election officials discovered that Project Vote, another
left-wing advocacy group, had filed scores of applications with phony addresses
and other questionable items. The acting city clerk asked the district
attorney's office to pursue possible criminal charges. Ohio, Nevada,
Iowa—similar stories abounded in states across the country.
Why is such activity
proliferating? It flows from the success of Democratic lawmakers in pushing
aside clear, orderly, and rigorous voting procedures in favor of elastic and
"inclusive" election rules that invite manipulation.
A machine for corruption
is the 1993 "Motor Voter Act," the first bill that President Clinton
signed. The law requires government officials to allow anyone who renews a
driver's license or applies for welfare or unemployment to register to vote on
the spot, without showing ID or proof of citizenship. It also allows ID-free
registration by mail. The law also makes it hard to purge voting lists of those
who've died or moved. All this makes vote fraud a cinch, almost as easy as when
Tammany Hall handed out pre-marked ballots.
Among the many abuses it
has spawned, the Motor Voter law seems to have enabled illegal aliens to
vote—for Democrats, evidence suggests. A 1996 INS investigation into alleged
Motor Voter fraud in California's 46th congressional district discovered that
"4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election
between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez."
Dornan lost by fewer
than 1,000 votes.
In 2002, Dean Gardner, a
losing GOP candidate for California's state legislature, sent out a survey to
14,000 first-time voters. A total of 1,691 surveys came back. The results were
startling: 76 people admitted that they weren't citizens but had voted, while
49 claimed not to have registered at their correct residence, as the law
requires. Gardner lost by only 266 votes.
In the 2000 election, as
the Missouri secretary of state later discovered, 56,000 St. Louis-area voters
held multiple voter registrations. No one knows how much actual fraud took
place, but it may have played a role in the Democratic defeats of incumbent
Republican senator John Ashcroft, who lost his seat by 49,000 votes, and
gubernatorial candidate Jim Talent, who lost by 21,000 votes.
All these stories of potential electoral abuses,
Democrats retort, pale beside the Republican shenanigans that helped deliver
Florida to George W. Bush in 2000. Media recounts that showed that Bush would
have won Florida under any reasonable recount standard are beside the point,
they say. Election officials wrongly identified thousands of people as felons,
most of them minorities, thus preventing them from voting under the state's
election laws. If those votes had counted, Democrats charge, Al Gore would be
president today.
But both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, election
officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to cast ballots. A Post analysis discovered that 5,600 people voted
whose names matched those of convicted felons. "These illegal voters
almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election,"
the Post reported. "Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68
percent were registered Democrats."
Democrats think that the
ambiguity in election laws will work to their benefit this fall, allowing them
to litigate every single close race. Unfortunately, if "anything
goes" continue to be the ballot bywords, the nation may soon wake up to a
crisis even bigger than the 2000 Florida nightmare. Perhaps then the public
will demand to know who subverted the election laws. But wouldn't it be better
if we did something about the problem now—even if it's as simple as requiring
everyone who votes to show an ID? In 2004, we should be well past the days of
Boss Tweed.
Comments
In 1946, I lived in
Texas. We were invited to the LBJ Ranch for dinner. My uncle John was Secretary of Agriculture
for Texas and knew Lyndon Johnson who was running for Congress. The day after
the election my dad asked John “How did Lyndon do last night”. Uncle John said
“Everybody who ever lived in those counties voted for Lyndon”.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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