How to Steal an Election

[Valin]

City Journal:

 

Autumn 2004

John Fund

 

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.

 

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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: "ndifference, fraud, corruption, and violence have marked the operation of our electoral system."

 

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