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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   31616 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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When election corruption was a little more blatant in Chicago in the second half of the twentieth century, it wasn’t all of Cook county that engaged in corruption. It was a dozen polling locations where the entire polling apparatus was safely within the Daley machine. Still enough to shore up mayoral and statewide Democrat vote totals, but narrow and focused enough that it wouldn’t disrupt all of the races.

Widespread, persistent election fraud is almost certainly not an actual occurrence. To the extent fraud is occurring, I would guess that it is following the Chicago model and focused on small partisan strongholds with the objective of keeping the graft dollars flowing.

Also, from what I remember, Chicago/Cook County was notorious for reporting results only after the rest of the state had come in.

There was a wacky sort-of-inverted example several years back--a statewide election in Wisconsin. Very close technically-nonpartisan (but not really) race, and as the last few votes were coming in from--predictably--Madison and Milwaukee, the Democrat-supported candidate narrowly pulled ahead. Then a stack of votes suddenly dropped in, mostly for the Republican-supported candidate, flipping the result. Everyone goes bananas.

It was quickly and easily proven that the last stack of votes was legitimate and the late reporting was genuinely an accident. What had happened was that a large chunk of a reliably-Republican county had reported in its vote totals to the central authority, and were marked off as having done so, but the recorder forgot to enter the count into the correct cells in the spreadsheet. That section reported zero votes for both candidates. There were no "found ballots," just a data entry error.

Several people who had been carefully following the results noticed the discrepancy, and made phone calls telling the officials about the issue, but there was enough of a delay confirming and correcting the error that various TV pundits had already been talking about how the D-supported candidate "appeared to have pulled out a narrow victory." They were unhappy when they had to walk that back on air.

The question, then, is whether if those Republican votes had been entered properly on time, would the Republican still have won?

Indeed. Since the race in question was the tie-breaking vote on the state Supreme Court, there was rather a lot riding on the result.

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