CHAPTER 2

Machine Politics and Stolen Elections

JIM NOWLAN AND HIS COAUTHORS in their book on Illinois politics repeat the story told by the former congressman and judge Abner Mikva to the University of Illinois at Chicago professor Milton Rakove about his experience as a college student. He was trying to volunteer to work in elections for the Democratic party, so he went to see his local Chicago Democratic ward committeeman. “I came in and said I wanted to help. Dead silence. ‘Who sent you?’ the committeeman said. I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent.’ Then he said, ‘We ain’t got no jobs.’ I said, ‘I don’t want a job.’ He said, ‘We don’t want nobody that don’t want a job.’”1

This story illustrates several aspects of political machines. They are built on loyalty and around patronage precinct workers to deliver the votes necessary to get party candidates elected. The winning candidates then control the government and distribute the spoils of patronage jobs and city contracts and hand out city services as political favors to voters who vote for the party slate of candidates.

Chicago and Illinois have had a history of machine politics since at least 1871. Machine politics has been based first and foremost on winning elections. To win elections, it has often been necessary to use illicit means, such as paying voters or stealing votes. There are many stories of vote stealing in Illinois elections.

In 1972, the Chicago Tribune did a series on vote rigging in Chicago’s skid-row area. It demonstrates one of the ways machine precinct captains stole elections. Reporter Bill Recktenwald dressed as a bum of the area, with a several-day-old beard. In his skid-row hotel lobby, he witnessed: “[P]recinct workers arrived at the hotel to sign up new voters. ‘It didn’t take long to see that something was wrong, because no one was there in front of the desk when they were registering people.’ When [Recktenwald] checked the registration rolls, he saw that he had been among those involuntarily signed up to vote [under the fictitious name with which he had registered at the hotel]. ‘James Joyce became a registered voter at the McCoy Hotel.’”2

In that same election, Recktenwald witnessed a precinct captain using the voting machine seventy times to fraudulently record votes that purportedly were cast by registered voters. In fact, those voters did not come to the polls and did not vote themselves. While vote-stealing techniques have changed since the methods witnessed by Recktenwald, election fraud has remained throughout Illinois’ history.

In the twenty-first century we have touch-screen and Scantron ballot voting, and most precinct captains (other than those who engage in voter-registration fraud and ghost voting for missing residents) haven’t learned to scam the system yet. The most common form of massive vote fraud now is rigging absentee voting in precincts, especially at nursing homes, where the elderly are easily manipulated by unscrupulous precinct captains who mark the seniors’ absentee ballots for them. While election fraud may have lessened in Illinois in recent years, there continue to be election-fraud cases. Vote stealing provides a bedrock for the other forms of corruption we recount in our book.

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Stolen Elections

Over the years, many elections in Chicago and in Illinois were stolen. The key for machine politics was continuing to win elections. Winning elections was critical to controlling government and its jobs, contracts, and policies. It is likely that the very first elections in Chicago in 1833 were rigged, as more votes were counted than there were voters. And that tradition of election fraud has continued to the present day.

The most famous “stolen” election was the presidential election of 1960, when the kingmaker Richard J. Daley is said to have stolen the election for John F. Kennedy. Even more importantly, from a local-politics standpoint, he was able to defeat Ben Adamowski, the Republican candidate for state’s attorney, and elect instead Democrat Daniel Ward, who would protect machine politicians from prosecution.

Kennedy won the state by 8,858 votes out of 4,657,394 cast, and Dan Ward beat Adamowski by 25,000 votes. Adamowski “charged that Daley had stolen 100,000 Democratic votes in 10 machine-dominated Chicago wards and had become ‘the most powerful political boss in America through a rigged election contest.’”17

Democrats and Republicans differed in their interpretation of the election. Based upon a canvass of less than one-third of Chicago precincts and only one kind of voting irregularity, Republicans erased more than half of the margin of victory for Kennedy and Ward. But Daley, probably correctly, countered in his testimony at the Illinois Election Board hearing that the same kinds of vote fraud were committed in Grundy and DuPage Counties by the Republicans.18 Votes were stolen in the 1960 election by Democrats in Chicago and Republicans in the suburbs. Apparently, Democrats were just better at stealing votes.

Election fraud during the Council of the Gray Wolves period from 1871 to 1931 is well documented. To give one example of the scope of the election fraud in this period, in 1935, “more than one hundred election officials were sentenced to jail for fraud.”19

The various techniques for stealing elections in the later twentieth century were also well known. Up until the last decades of the century, most polling places used paper ballots. With such a system, it was relatively easy to steal votes. If a voter died or moved before the election, the precinct captain, with the help of the election judges that he appointed, would simply vote in their stead. He would just fill out the paper ballot and put it in the ballot box.

Chicago Alderman Ed Burke is fond of telling the story of an elderly woman who lived all her life in a small Indiana town. She goes to her lawyer to draw up her will and specifies that when she dies, she is to be buried in Chicago. Her lawyer asks why on earth she would do this, since she had always lived in this small Indiana town. Well, she explained, “I want to continue to vote Democratic after I die.” Certainly there are many documented election-fraud cases in which the dead vote, or like in Bill Recktenwald’s Tribune exposé, fraudulent, nonexistent voters like James Joyce do.

In some of the paper-ballot precincts, the precinct captain would simply steal a single paper ballot when the polls opened. He would then stand outside campaigning. When one of his voters came up, the captain would give the voter the ballot he had already marked for the favored candidates. The voter would take the marked ballot with him into the polling place and obtain a new blank ballot. Once the voter drew the curtain to vote in secret, he would substitute the marked ballot for the blank one and place the marked one in the ballot box. When he left the polling place, he would give the new blank ballot to the precinct captain as proof he had cast the premarked ballot. In return, the precinct captain would either give him money—a five-dollar bill in the later years—or send him to the local tavern around the corner where he could get beer or liquor for doing his civic duty the Democratic machine way. The captain would then mark the blank ballot for the next voter. This technique was known as the paper-ballot chain. And without poll watchers for opposing candidates or honest election judges, it was unbeatable.

~Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality by Dick Simpson and Thomas J. Gradel

I've also read somewhere that people would get bused from precinct to precinct and would all vote for the same person. It probably happens to this day.