Where There's Smoke, There's Fire: 100,000 Stolen Votes in Chicago
Where Chairman
Mao believed that all power comes from the barrel of the gun, the
late Mayor Richard J. Daley believed that all power comes from the
barrel into which precinct totals have been tossed.
-David Nyhan,
The Boston Globe, December 16, 1982
The "Truth About
Voter Fraud," according to activist groups like the Brennan
Center, is that "many of the claims of voter fraud amount to a
great deal of smoke without much fire…. The allegations
simply do not pan out."
[1]
Chicago, however,
is known for its fires, and there was a roaring one there in 1982
that resulted in one of the largest voter fraud prosecutions ever
conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice. The telltale smoke
arose out of one of the closest governor's races in Illinois
history; and as for the fire, the U.S. Attorney in Chicago at the
time, Daniel Webb, estimated that
at least 100,000 fraudulent
votes (10 percent of all votes in the city) had been cast.
[2]
Sixty-five individuals were indicted for federal election crimes,
and all but two (one found incompetent to stand trial and another
who died) were convicted.
[3]
This case of
voter fraud is worth studying today because it illustrates the
techniques that political machines and organized political groups
use to steal elections. Even in the present day, this threat is not
hypothetical: Tactics similar to those documented in the Chicago
case have come to light in recent elections in Philadelphia
and in the states of Wisconsin and Tennessee. The Daley machine may
be legendary in modern times for its election fraud prowess, but
these recent cases show that the incentives and opportunities for
fraud have not lessened. Guarding against these tactics can
make the difference between a fair election and a stolen election,
particularly where the margins of victory are narrow and just
a few fraudulent votes can change the outcome.
Background
In 1982, Illinois
was the setting for "a hotly contested" gubernatorial race
between Democratic Senator Adlai Stevenson III, son of former
governor and presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson II, and
Republican James Thompson.
[4] "Big Jim" Thompson, the incumbent, was
"a 15-point favorite going into the voting";
[5] and yet on election
day, Adlai Stevenson came within 5,074 votes of capturing the
governorship out of 3.67 million votes cast statewide-a 0.14
percent margin.
[6] Stevenson had carried Chicago by 3 to 1,
with a winning margin of 469,000 votes, although Thompson won 60
percent of the vote in the rest of the state.
[7]
After the results
were in, Stevenson immediately filed suit, contesting the results
of the election and asking for a recount. He conceded defeat only
when the Illinois Supreme Court two months later rejected his
request for a statewide recount.
[8]
Stevenson claimed
there was evidence of voter fraud in areas of the state outside of
Chicago. Although those claims "did not pan out," it was clear that
"the prospect of a close [judicial] look at the conduct of voting
in Chicago did not please many of Chicago's Democratic kingpins,
already under pressure because of the federal [criminal]
investigation of charges of vote fraud in the [1982]
election.…" For that reason, "many committeemen privately
had expressed a hope that Stevenson would lose his bid for a
recount."
[9]
Both campaigns
had complained to the FBI, but the federal investigation was really
sparked by a party worker from Chicago's 39th Ward who was upset by
his precinct captain's broken promise to award him a city job for
his participation in the vote fraud. The worker told a Chicago
newspaper, and then the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office, "what
he knew about vote fraud in that precinct."
[10]
Good reporting by
the local media helped fuel the investigation. One wire story
concerned "a man listed as voting at a Skid Row precinct in the
27th Ward [who] had been dead for more than two years." He was
listed as living at the Arcade Hotel, and his signature was among
those of 47 other voters listed as living at the hotel. However,
the "[o]perators and residents of the hotel told the Sun-Times that
41 of the 47 people did not reside at the Arcade."
[11]
In its reporting,
the
Chicago Tribune discovered that the supposed home
address of three voters in the 17th Precinct of the 27th Ward was a
vacant lot. The paper also discovered that votes had been cast for
seven residents of a nursing home who denied having voted-their
signatures on the ballot applications were all forgeries. In fact,
one resident had no fingers or thumbs with which to write a
signature.
[12] The fraud was so blatant that the
resident without fingers or thumbs "was counted as having voted
twice by the end of the day."
[13] Not surprisingly,
Stevenson easily won the 17th Precinct, by a margin of 282 to 30.
[14]
These stories
illustrated what was to be a recurring theme in the grand jury
investigation: the theft of identities and the casting of
fraudulent votes on behalf of dead voters, prison inmates, and
people who had moved, as well as forged ballots cast on behalf of
the elderly and the handicapped. Even fictitious voters were
invented and ballots cast in their names.
Grand Jury
Findings
On December 14,
1984, Chief Judge Frank McGarr of the U.S. District Court for
the Northern District of Illinois publicly released the
federal grand jury's report on the 1982 election-only the third
time in the history of the court that a grand jury report had been
made public.
[15] The evidence revealed substantial
vote fraud in Chicago during the November 2, 1982, election and
found "that similar fraudulent activities have occurred prior to
1982."
[16]
What particularly
struck FBI agent Ernest Locker was how routine vote fraud was for
the precinct captains, election judges, poll watchers, and
political party workers he interviewed. They had been taught how to
steal votes (and elections) by their predecessors, who had in turn
been taught by their predecessors. Based on his investigation,
Locker came to believe the claims, hotly debated among historians,
that Mayor Daley threw the 1960 presidential election for John
Kennedy with massive ballot stuffing in Chicago.
[17] This type of
voter fraud, stated Locker, "was an accepted way of life in
Chicago."
[18]
Soon after the
investigation started, it became evident that this was not a case
of isolated wrongdoing, but rather a case of extensive,
substantial, and widespread fraud in precincts and wards
throughout Chicago. The FBI investigators concluded that their
regular tools-interviewing witnesses, obtaining documents, and
using handwriting experts to analyze signatures on documents-would
not be up to the task. After all, to conduct a complete
investigation, they would have to review "virtually all of the
1,000,000 ballot applications submitted in the City of Chicago in
the November election" as well as the voter lists maintained by the
election board for all of Chicago's 2,910 precincts
(comprising approximately 1.6 million voters) to check for the
names of voters registered in more than one precinct, as well
as registered voters who were dead.
[19]
So the FBI
employed a new and unique tool in vote fraud investigation: a
computer. Because this had never been done before, the FBI had to
write a computer program that would match data between the list of
registered voters, the list of individuals who had voted, and other
databases. To that end, the FBI and federal prosecutors obtained
death records from the Bureau of Vital Statistics; local, state,
and federal prison records; the national Social Security list;
Immigration and Naturalization Service records on aliens; driver's
license records; and even utility (gas, electric, water, and
telephone) records.
[20]
Locker was
shocked at the sheer magnitude of the number of fraudulent votes
and the fact that fraud occurred in every single Chicago
precinct.
[21] More than 3,000 votes had been cast in
the names of individuals who were dead, and more than 31,000
individuals had voted twice in different locations in the city.
[22]
Thousands of individuals had supposedly voted despite being
incarcerated at the time of the election, and utility records
showed that some individuals who voted were registered as living on
vacant lots.
Armed with that
information, Locker did something unprecedented: He convinced
his supervisors to dedicate all of the agents in the FBI field
office in Chicago for an entire week to nothing but reviewing
all of Chicago's voter registration cards and ballot
applications.
[23] So many signature comparisons were needed
that the FBI flew in handwriting experts from its headquarters in
Washington.
[24] The Justice Department and the FBI have
never concentrated that much manpower and resources, before or
since, on investigating a voter fraud case.
Teams of FBI
agents were paired with Assistant United States Attorneys and
assigned to investigate specific precincts, locating and talking to
voters who had supposedly cast votes in the polling place.
[25]
They quickly learned that voters' signatures on ballot applications
"had been forged wholesale in many precincts."
[26] The investigation
also "revealed that there were an extremely large number of
transients, incapacitated people, and senior citizens in whose
names votes had been fraudulently cast" when they did not
themselves vote.
[27]
The investigation
uncovered a variety of voter-fraud techniques.
Preying on the
Disabled and Elderly. The evidence showed that the
conspirators evaded detection by casting ballots for those
persons who would be the most unlikely to challenge the theft of
their franchise. In the Seventh Circuit's Olinger decision,
for example, the court described how the votes of elderly and
handicapped voters who lived at a residential facility were stolen
in a special absentee election:
Hicks [the
Democratic Party precinct captain] told the election judges that
the residents of Monroe Pavillion were "crazy." He instructed
appellant and the other election judges to ignore the wishes of the
residents. Instead, the election judges were told to "punch 10" on
the computerized ballot for every resident. Punching 10 on the
ballot resulted in a vote for each of the Democratic candidates on
the ballot. On October 30, 1982, appellant and the other election
judges, with Hicks in attendance, conducted the special election at
Monroe Pavillion. In over two hours of voting, approximately 52
residents voted. Appellant and the other election judges cast
nearly all of those votes for the straight Democratic Party ticket
by punching 10.
[28]
As described in
the
Olinger decision, votes of the elderly and disabled were
regularly stolen at the residences where they lived. Their wishes
were ignored, and the judges of election, under instructions from
the precinct captain, punched a straight Democratic ticket. Most
significantly, several Assistant State's Attorneys served as
election observers but did not detect the fraud because they
"believed it was the job of the judges of election to assist the
voters and accurately register their choices for candidates."
They failed to realize, however, that these "assistors" were
actually ignoring the voters' preferences.
[29]
Impersonating
Absent Voters. The dominant form of vote fraud was accomplished
with ballots cast for absent voters.
[30] The fraud often began with
the legally required canvasses conducted in many precincts prior to
the election:
Although the
canvass disclosed that a number of persons who were registered to
vote in the precinct had died, moved away, or for some other reason
had become ineligible to vote, these persons were not struck from
the list of eligible voters. Finally on election day the
defendants, either personally or by acting through others, caused
numerous false ballots to be cast for the straight Democratic
ticket.
[31]
On the day of the
general election, dishonest precinct captains kept careful track of
who came to the polls to vote. Runners working for the precinct
captains not only supplied rides for voters, but also noted "who
would not be coming to the polls because they were too sick, were
too drunk, had recently moved away, or had died."
Precinct captains
supplied the names of those absent voters to other participants in
the fraud, and "ballots either were punched on the voting machines
by people posing as the voter, or were punched with ball point pens
or other similar objects in a private place outside the polling
areas by the precinct captain or his workers."
[32] Some of the
defendants even "went into washrooms, where they practiced forging
the signatures" of those whom they believed would not vote.
[33]
Registering
Aliens. Aliens who were illegally registered were another
source of potential votes "for the unscrupulous precinct captain."
The grand jury found that many aliens "register to vote so that
they can obtain documents identifying them as U.S. citizens" and
had "used their voters' cards to obtain a myriad of benefits, from
social security to jobs with the Defense Department."
[34] In
fact, three aliens were charged "with attempting to get U.S.
passports by using their voter registration cards."
[35]
U.S. Attorney Dan
Webb estimated that 80,000 illegal aliens were registered to vote
in Chicago.
[36] Dozens of aliens were indicted and
convicted for registering and voting,
[37] and one individual was
indicted for recruiting an illegal alien to register to vote.
[38]
False
Registrations. Another way to obtain names that could be voted
on election day was to have people falsely register to vote in a
precinct. One party precinct captain, for example, had two city
workers who were seeking to transfer their job locations register
in his precinct even though they did not live there. Even the
assistant precinct captain was falsely registered.
[39] In some
instances, the conspirators asked actual residents at the addresses
where voters falsely claimed to reside to "place name-tags on their
doors that bore the names of the non-resident registrants."
[40]
Other canvassers were indicted and charged with certifying the
addresses of voters when no such address existed.
[41]
Casting
Fraudulent Absentee Ballots. Precinct captains would ask their
workers "to encourage voters to apply for absentee ballots whether
or not they had a valid reason to do so and to turn the blank
ballots over" so that the captains could vote the ballots. One
worker noticed that two of the absentee ballots he delivered to a
precinct captain had already been filled out: One "was straight
Democratic, but…the other contained some Republican entries.
The precinct captain caused the second absentee ballot containing
Republican entries to be torn up."
[42]
Buying
Votes. The going rate for a vote in one particular Chicago ward
was two dollars, and some precinct captains kept a supply of dollar
bills ready on election day solely for buying votes. Alcohol was
also used as an incentive to get people to the polls, with one
hotel manager ordering "the liquor in advance from the precinct
captain."
[43]
Altering the
Vote Count. Changing the actual vote count was another method
of fraud. For example, one precinct captain and his son held their
own fraudulent election after the polls closed by repeatedly
running two ballots through the voting machine. At that time,
Chicago was using punch cards for ballots, and punch card counting
machines in the precincts totaled the votes cast (similar to the
way optical-scan paper ballots are totaled today by computer
scanners in the precincts). One ballot was a straight
Democratic "punch 10," and the precinct captain ran it through
the counting machine 198 times. In order to avoid suspicion, he
also ran a ballot containing some Republican votes through the
machine six times.
[44] All of the votes in that precinct
were fraudulent except for those two original ballots.
[45]
Lessons Learned
Three factors, in
particular, contributed to the successful electoral fraud of former
Mayor Daley's political machine.
Interference
by Party Officials.Precinct captains in Chicago did not
work for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. They were
political appointees of the ward committeemen and therefore
answered only to the committeemen and their political party. A
precinct captain's loyalty was not to running a clean and fair
election but to the political party that controlled his ward.
Despite not working for the election board, precinct captains often
opened and supervised the polls on election day and directed or
influenced the door-to-door canvasses "required by law in order to
determine the accuracy of voter registration."
[46]
Because the
election board approved all of the individuals submitted by the
precinct captains and their political party to serve as official
election judges, the precinct captains controlled the polling
places even though it was the election judges who were legally
responsible for the administration of each polling place. This
patronage system tied the administration of elections into the
political system that ran the city and dispensed jobs. This
structure, in turn, created the means and the incentive to "steal
votes on Election Day."
[47]
Lack of a
Bipartisan Election System. Chicago witnessed the complete
failure of its "bipartisan system [that] is meant to protect the
election process from vote fraud."
[48] This system assumes that
there are two active political parties, each watching the other and
overseeing all activities that occur during the election process,
from voter registration to the administration of polling places on
election day, to ensure that the law is followed and no fraud
occurs.
For example, the
canvasses that occurred before the election to check the accuracy
of the voter registration list would provide "the intended
bipartisan checks and balances only if it is conducted by two
people representing opposite parties."
[49] But in Chicago, the
Republican Party was not strong enough in many sections of the city
to function as a counterbalance to the Democratic Party. As a
result, Chicago's voter registration list did not receive
bipartisan scrutiny and contained many ineligible persons,
including voters who had moved, were deceased, were not U.S.
citizens, did not reside where they were registered, or were
registered in more than one location.
Similarly, there
were supposed to be both Democratic and Republican judges of
election in the Chicago polling places, but many of the
"Republican" slots were actually filled by Democrats
masquerading as Republicans who had been chosen by the
Democratic precinct captains. As a result, the "Republican"
canvassers and election judges actually assisted their
Democratic counterparts in committing fraud.
[50]
Biased or
Inexperienced Poll Watchers. Poll watchers are intended to be
the guardians of a clean election "by participating as critical
observers."
[51] A well-trained and vigilant poll watcher
should have been able to spot some of the types of voter fraud that
occurred in the polling places in the 1982 Chicago election.
However, many of the poll watchers in the worst Chicago precincts
were individuals who had been appointed by precinct captains and
were often part of the voter fraud conspiracy, even helping to
cast fraudulent ballots.
There were also
truly neutral poll watchers in Chicago during that election,
but their lack of training and their inexperience in conducting
elections allowed fraud to go on without detection. In one
particular precinct where a legitimate poll watcher was
present the entire day, the grand jury found that:
The precinct
captain passed slips of paper to a cooperating judge of election
who filled out ballot applications when the pollwatcher was not
observing her. Various precinct workers surreptitiously went
through the line multiple times. Ballots were punched outside of
the polling area.
[52]
The grand jury
commented that the subsequent mayoral election in 1983 appeared to
have occurred without substantial evidence of voter fraud and that
each of the "candidate[s] had a squadron of poll watchers who
observed polling place activities with an eagle eye."
[53] Of
course, that mayoral election may also have been free of fraud
because U.S. Attorney Dan Webb enlisted U.S. marshals, agents
from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, FBI agents, and
more than 80 Assistant U.S. Attorneys to "patrol polling places and
investigate vote fraud complaints on Election Day."
[54]
According to one
of the federal prosecutors in the case, the major reason that
Harold Washington was elected the first black mayor of Chicago in
1983 was because the Daley machine's grip on the electoral
process was broken by the federal prosecutions stemming from
the grand jury investigation.
[55]
Grand Jury
Recommendations
In commenting on
the voter fraud that occurred in Chicago, the grand jury expressed
its disgust at "the flagrant disregard for our democratic system
which is the hallmark of this crime." It was "shocked and dismayed
at the boldness and the cavalier attitude with which these offenses
have been carried out." It urged all citizens to watch for vote
fraud and report irregular activities in their polling places and
to "step forward and participate in the election process by
becoming precinct captains, judges of election, and
pollwatchers."
[56]
To reduce the
incidence of voter fraud, the grand jury made three concrete
recommendations:
-
Sever the
relationship between party precinct captains and election
judges. Judges hired by the election board to conduct canvasses
and administer polling places on election day should be paid
professionals whose loyalty and responsibility are to the election
board, not to the local political party or elected city
officials.
-
Require all
voters to provide a thumbprint when registering and when
voting. Voters would place a thumbprint on a small pretreated
box on the ballot application (not the ballot itself) when they
vote. According to the grand jury, this was the only way to counter
the widespread forgery of voters' signatures that occurred in
this voter fraud conspiracy. The grand jury pointed out the virtues
of this protection:
No fingerprint
would be placed on the actual ballot; therefore, the ballot would
still be totally secret as it is now. The voter would not be
required to put his finger in ink in order to register his print.
The process is totally clean and is not intrusive. Many banks
already use this identifying process on check cashing cards to
verify the identity of the card user.
Requiring a print
on every ballot application would be a tremendous deterrent to
vote fraud and no more of an invasion of privacy than a handwritten
signature. It is impossible to forge a print. Fingerprint
experts cannot be fooled. If the precinct captain voted for
absent voters using the prints of paid volunteers, for example, the
print of the absent voter could be compared with the print on the
ballot application. If people in the polling place
participated in the fraud by placing their prints in the boxes,
they would be readily identifiable.
[57]
The advantages of
this system are obvious, particularly since it would eliminate the
difficulty of trying to determine who forged a signature
and thus cast a fraudulent ballot on election day or a fraudulent
absentee ballot through the mail.
-
Void ballots
after counting them. In the Chicago fraud, ballot outcomes
were altered by running the same Democratic punch card ballot
through a precinct tally machine multiple times. The grand jury
suggested that counting machines be altered to "irrevocably mark
each counted ballot" to prevent it from being run through the
machine again.
Although most jurisdictions have moved away from punch card voting
machines since the 2000 presidential election, the paper ballots
and precinct-based optical scanners used in many states today
are subject to the same type of abuse.
National
Implications
The Chicago
voter-fraud conspiracy and the grand jury's report on it offer
lessons that are relevant today in understanding how voter
fraud works and how to combat it effectively.
Partisan
Election Boards. The importance of a truly bipartisan system of
checks and balances in which members of both major political
parties (and minor parties to the extent that they have available
membership) have representatives at every polling place is key to
guaranteeing the integrity of elections. Equal representation on
the boards of elections that oversee the administration of
elections is just as important. In a 1993 case in Philadelphia, for
example, Democratic members of the county board of elections
"applied the election code in a discriminatory manner designed
to favor one candidate."
[58]
Unfortunately,
there are still many jurisdictions-particularly large cities
like Philadelphia- that are controlled by one political party and
have too few members of the other party involved in the
administration of elections. Transparency, as accomplished by
bipartisan oversight and the work of well-trained election
observers, is the hallmark of election integrity.
Voter
Misidentification. While the grand jury's thumbprint
recommendation has not been adopted in the United States, it has
shown great success in reducing voter fraud in Mexico:
To obtain voter
credentials, the citizen must present a photo, write a signature
and give a thumbprint. The voter card includes a picture with a
hologram covering it, a magnetic strip and a serial number to guard
against tampering. To cast a ballot, voters must present the card
and be certified by a thumbprint scanner. This system was
instrumental in allowing the 2000 election of Vicente Fox, the
first opposition party candidate to be elected president in seventy
years.
[59]
This system was
essential to stopping the massive voter fraud that had
occurred in Mexico's elections for much of its history.
Whether such a requirement could overcome civil liberties and
privacy concerns in America is uncertain; however, such a
requirement combined with a photo ID would eliminate many forms of
voter fraud that continue to occur across the country.
Unreliable
Registration Lists. The Chicago voter fraud also demonstrates
the importance of maintaining voter registration lists by
regularly deleting the names of voters who have died or moved away.
Otherwise, the lists will contain a large pool of names that can be
used to steal an election by the casting of fraudulent votes. Many
states, such as Indiana and Missouri, have neglected the
maintenance of their voter registration lists for years.
For the first
decade that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) was in
effect, the Justice Department never filed a single enforcement
action against any state for failing to maintain its list and purge
ineligible voters. Recent lawsuits by the Civil Rights Division of
the Department of Justice against jurisdictions that had failed to
purge ineligible voters as required by the NVRA have been
sharply criticized as attempts to "disenfranchise" voters.
[60]
New technology
and readily available Internet databases could resolve another
persistent problem found by the grand jury in 1982 that still
exists in registration lists all over the country today: phony
voter registration addresses. Election jurisdictions do not
routinely run comparisons between their voter registration lists
and the information that is available in tax or utility records or
through geolocation services such as Google Earth.
As was
demonstrated by the FBI in the Chicago case, such data matching can
quickly turn up registration addresses that are vacant lots or
businesses-evidence of possible registration fraud. Similarly,
if 100 individuals are registered at an address that is a
single-family residence, that is clear evidence of fraud. The
techniques developed by the FBI in 1982 should be incorporated
into the processes used by states today to verify the accuracy of
the information in their voter registration lists.
Recent cases in
Wisconsin and Tennessee show that the tactics used in Chicago to
steal votes have not been forgotten and are still in use today,
despite the election "reforms" of recent years.
In Wisconsin-a
state that John Kerry won by only 11,000 votes-the technique of
running comparisons between the voter registration list and
other databases was employed in a 2004 investigation of
possible voter fraud in Milwaukee.
[61] The Milwaukee Police
Department's Special Investigations Unit, working with the
U.S. Attorney's Office, the local district attorney, and the FBI,
used Google databases, motor vehicle records, telephone
directories, Assessor's Office records, and U.S. Postal
Service records to investigate allegations of voter fraud. They
uncovered a variety of problems:
-
5,217
"students" who were registered to vote at a polling place located
within the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who listed as their
residence an on-campus dormitory that housed only 2,600
students;
-
At least 220
ineligible felons who had voted;
-
370 addresses
that were not legal residences in the city;
-
Residents of
other states (such as a voter from Chicago) who registered and
voted in Milwaukee;
-
Numerous
staffers from out of state who were working for the Kerry campaign
or the Environmental Victory Campaign, a political action
committee, and who illegally registered and voted in Milwaukee;
and
-
Hundreds of
homeless individuals registered as living at office buildings, at
store fronts, and in multiple locations who were "able to vote in
different districts and, by sheer number,
could have an
impact on a closely contested local election."
[62]
In Tennessee, a
state senate race in 2005 that was decided by only 13 votes led to
the expulsion of the winner from the legislature after it was found
that votes had been cast by individuals who were dead at the time
of the election, felons whose voting rights had not been
restored, voters whose residences were vacant lots, and voters
who actually lived outside of the district. Three election workers
in one precinct were convicted of 12 felonies for faking votes by
making false entries on election documents and other misconduct,
including forging the signatures of deceased voters on ballot
forms and falsely certifying vote totals.
[63]
These election
workers engaged in the same type of fraud that was used in Chicago
in 1982, and, again, this fraud could have been avoided if deceased
voters had been deleted from the registration lists and
registration addresses had been checked. Having bipartisan election
workers and poll watchers in the polling place might have also
prevented such actions.
Conclusion
Voter fraud in
Chicago, in just one election, led to 100,000 phony votes,
[64]
bringing the defendants in this case within 5,000 votes of stealing
the governorship of Illinois. This case of widespread fraud
was broken wide open only because of the failed promise of a city
job to one of the participants and the dogged determination of a
United States Attorney who was willing to commit the time,
resources, and manpower required for a massive investigation and
multiple prosecutions. The Justice Department has never engaged in
such an intense investigation since then, to the detriment of the
electoral system.
We will never
know whether, when Mayor Daley was still alive and in full control
of Chicago's election machinery, he manufactured the 8,858
votes that won Illinois for John Kennedy in 1960.
[65] The 1984 grand
jury report certainly shows that it could easily have been done,
and the fact that the indicted defendants told investigators that
their predecessors had taught them how to commit fraud makes it
seem likely. As retired FBI agent Ernest Locker, Jr., observed,
massive voter fraud was a way of life for the city's political
machine and shows that "what happens in a small area can sometimes
change history."
[66]
Worth quoting in
full is the final comment of the Chicago grand jury's report on its
voter fraud investigation:
Every vote that
is fraudulently manufactured disenfranchises the legitimate
voter and makes a mockery of our political process. Vote fraud
is like a cancer, and it must be treated so that it will not
destroy our constitutional right to vote, the basis of our
American heritage.
[67]
That observation
is no less true today than it was in 1982.
Hans A. von
Spakovsky served as a member of the Federal Election Commission for
two years. Before that, he was Counsel to the Assistant Attorney
General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, where
he specialized in voting and election issues. He also served as a
county election official in Georgia for five years as a member of
the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections.
[1] Justin Levitt, The Truth
About Voter Fraud 3(Brennan Center for Justice 2007).
[2] Douglas Frantz,
Vote Fraud
in City Outlined at Hearing, Chi. Trib., Sept. 20, 1983, at A1;
Mark Eissman,
U.S. to Probe Primary Vote Fraud-Federal Laws May
Have Been Broken, Chi. Trib., Mar. 11, 1987.
See also
Ken Bode,
The Vote Thieves, NBC Evening News, Jan. 31,
1984.
[3] See In re Report of
the Special January 1982 Grand Jury 1, No. 82 GJ 1909 (N.D. Ill.
Dec. 14, 1984) (hereinafter Grand Jury Report);
U.S. v.
Howard, 774 F.2d 838 (7th Cir. 1985);
U.S. v. Olinger,
759 F.2d 1293 (7th Cir. 1985); Interview with Ernest Locker,
Jr. (Mar. 18, 2008). One of the young federal prosecutors in the
case at the time was Craig Donsanto, who now heads the
Election Crimes Unit in the Public Integrity Section of the
Criminal Division at the Department of Justice. Today, he has more
than 30 years of experience as a career prosecutor and is
recognized as the foremost expert in the United States on the
prosecution of election crimes. He is the author of the Justice
Department handbook on the prosecution of election crimes used by
all of the Offices of United States Attorneys,
Federal
Prosecution of Election Offenses, which is in its seventh
edition. Ernest Locker, Jr., now retired, was the FBI agent in
Chicago in charge of this investigation.
[4] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 3.
[5] David Nyhan,
Ballot
Counting, Chicago Style, Boston Globe, Dec. 16, 1982.
[6] Associated Press,
U.S.
Probes Ghost-Voting in Illinois on Nov. 2, Boston Globe,
Dec. 30, 1982.
[8] Daniel Egler and Michael
Arndt,
Adlai Concedes Defeat-Bid for Recount Loses by 4-3 in
Supreme Court, Chi. Trib., Jan. 8, 1983;
In re Contest of
the Election for the Offices of Governor and Lieutenant Governor
Held at the General Election on Nov. 2, 1982, 444 N.E.2d 170,
93 Ill. 2d 463 (Ill. 1983).
[9] Egler and Arndt,
supra note 8.
[10] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 3.
[11] Associated Press,
supra note 6.
[12] Tim Franklin and Andy
Knott,
More Election Fraud Uncovered-3 Voters Listed Vacant Lot
as Their Home Address, Chi. Trib., Dec. 31, 1982, at A15.
[13] William B. Crawford, Jr.,
and Tim Franklin,
U.S. Grand Jury Indicts 10 in Chicago Vote
Fraud Probe, Chi. Trib., April 8, 1983, at B1.
[14] Franklin and Knott,
supra note 12.
[15] William B. Crawford, Jr.,
Report Says Polls, Pols Don't Mix-Grand Jury Report Links
Patronage, Vote Fraud, Chi. Trib., Dec. 18, 1984, at A1.
[16] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 1.
[17] See, e.g., Tracy
Campbell, Deliver the Vote, A History of Election Fraud, and
American Political Tradition 1742- 2004 242-249 (Carroll & Graf
Publishers 2005).
[18] Interview with Ernest
Locker, Jr. (Mar. 18, 2008).
[19] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3,at 5; Barbara Mahany,
FBI Examines Voting
Lists, Chi. Trib., Feb. 9, 1983, at NW2; William B. Crawford,
Jr., and Jerry Crimmins,
Huge Vote-Fraud Probe-FBI to Check
Every Voter, All Precincts, Chi. Trib., Jan. 20, 1983, at
1.
[20] Interview with Ernest
Locker, Jr. (Mar. 18, 2008).
[21] According to Locker, they
could have prosecuted thousands of cases in every single Chicago
precinct, something they did not have the manpower to do, so
instead they concentrated on identifying the precincts and wards
with the highest volume of fraudulent activity.
Id.
[23] Interview with Ernest
Locker, Jr. (Mar. 18, 2008).
[24] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 5.
[25] Interviewing voters is,
unfortunately, something that the FBI and the Justice Department
are extremely reluctant to do today because, even in the face of
obvious voter fraud, they are likely to be accused by the media and
certain advocacy organizations of trying to intimidate voters. The
political leadership of both agencies is not usually willing to
risk incurring such accusations.
[26] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 5.
[28] Olinger, 759 F.2d
at 1297. On election day, Hicks also distributed the names of
registered voters who had moved away or died so that fraudulent
ballots could be cast in "the names of the phantom voters."
Id.
[29] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 12. This is a recurring problem. In 1998,
former Congressman Austin Murphy of Pennsylvania was convicted of
absentee ballot fraud in a nursing home. John Fund, Stealing
Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy 44 (Encounter
Books 2004).
[30] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 7.
[31] Howard, 774 F.2d at
840. The type of massive investigation undertaken by the FBI and
the U.S. Attorney's Office to review in detail a jurisdiction's
voter registration list to check it for the names of voters who
have moved, died, or registered in more than one location has also
not been undertaken since the Chicago case.
[32] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 8.
[33] Crawford and
Franklin,
supra note 13.
[34] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 8-9.
[35] Crawford and
Franklin,
supra note 13.
[36] Frantz,
supra note 2.
[37] Marianne Taylor,
28
Indicted on Charges of Vote Fraud, Chi. Trib., Apr. 7, 1983, at
B13. Eighteen of the aliens were from Mexico, three from Belize,
two from Costa Rica, two from Nigeria, and one from Haiti.
[38] Barbara Brotman and
William Recktenwald,
5 Indicted in Vote Fraud, Chi. Trib.,
Feb. 18, 1983, at 1. One alien who was born in Belize and voted in
the 1982 election testified in 1985 before a state senate task
force about the ease with which he and his two sisters registered
to vote. None of them were ever required to show any identification
when they registered, and they simply listed false birthplace
information. Desiree F. Hicks,
Foreigners Landing on Voter
Rolls, Chi. Trib., Oct. 2, 1985.
[39] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 9.
[40] Howard, 774 F.2d at
840.
[41] Taylor,
supra note 37.
[42] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 10.
[43] Id. One runner
testified that "he was driving two winos back from the polling
place when they got into a fist fight in the back seat of his car
over whether to spend their pooled dollars on hamburgers or a
bottle of wine."
Id. at 11.
[44] The only Republican votes
on the ballot were for Governor James Thompson and former Attorney
General Tyrone Fahner.
Brotman and Recktenwald,
supra
note 38.
[45] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 11.
[52] Id.at 20. One of
the federal prosecutors provided an amusing example of how another
legitimate poll watcher was fooled. Some of the defendants supplied
him with coffee all day, and every time he went to the bathroom,
the defendants stuffed the ballot box with phony votes.
[54] Brotman and
Recktenwald,
supra note 38.
[55] Unfortunately, that effect
may have been short-lived. By the 1987 mayoral election, there were
already new claims of widespread voter fraud and allegations
that Washington and his allies had opposed efforts to reform the
system "by blocking legislation to hire professional [election]
judges and cleanse voting rolls of illegal registration."
See Mark Eissman,
U.S. to Probe Primary Vote
Fraud-Federal Laws May Have Been Broken, Chi. Trib., Mar. 11,
1987.
[56] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 2.
[58] Marks v. Stinson,
19 F.3d 873 (3d Cir. 1994);
see generally Larry Sabato and
Glenn R. Simpson, Dirty Little Secrets: The Persistence of
Corruption in American Politics 278
-283 (Times
Books 1996).
[59] Fund,
supra note
29, at 5-6.
[60] See, e.g., Greg
Gordon,
Justice Department Actions Expected to Draw
Congressional Scrutiny, McClatchy, Jan. 9, 2008.
[61] See Special
Investigations Unit, Milwaukee Police Department, Report of the
Investigation into the November 2, 2004, General Election in the
City of Milwaukee.
[62] Id. at 16-17, 21,
25, 27, 31, 41, and 49 (emphasis added). Although the
Milwaukee
Report does not identify which political campaign was involved,
information in the report describing the individuals makes it clear
that it was the Kerry campaign. For example, the description of
campaign worker 6 on page 49 matches Andy Gordon, who was the Kerry
campaign's Deputy Political Director in Wisconsin.
See also
Democracy in Action, Kerry General Election Wisconsin Campaign
Organization, at
www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/kerry/kerrgenwi.html
(last visited May 11, 2008). Similarly, though the report does not
identify the 527 organization involved, it cites a press release
from the Environmental Victory Campaign that makes the
connection.
[63] Marc Perrusquia,
Judge:
Let's Air Details of Fraud-Public Has Right, Colton Says in Ophelia
Ford Election Case, Com. Appeal, May 22, 2007; Marc Perrusquia,
Thirteen More Votes May Be Illegal-Senate Republican Gets Data
on Dist. 29 from Private Eye, Com. Appeal, Feb. 7, 2006; Marc
Perrusquia,
Poll Boss Had Felony on Record-Not an Eligible
Voter; Works for Ford Family, Com. Appeal, Feb. 1, 2006;
Report of Ad Hoc Comm. on Senate District No. 29, Election
Contest, April 17, 2006, Minutes of Wednesday, April 19, 2006,
Seventy-Second Legislative Day, Tennessee Senate, at 2997-3001.
[64] Ernest Locker says that
the 100,000 fraudulent-vote estimate was actually very
conservative, based on the detailed analysis and review conducted
by the investigators and handwriting experts in different
precincts. He believes a much larger number of phony votes was
likely cast. Interview with Ernest Locker, Jr. (Mar. 18, 2008).
[65] Sabato and Simpson,
supra note 58, at 277.
[66] Interview with Ernest
Locker, Jr. (Mar. 18, 2008).
[67] Grand Jury Report,
supra note 3, at 26.
