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Notes -
There Are No Machines
Over the past 2 years, I’ve heard a number of election denialists, both online and in the media, that suggest that “machine politics” were somehow involved in rigging the 2020 election. What these theories all have in common is that they simply take for granted the existence of political machines in large cities, mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest; indeed, in some cases the city is simply mentioned as if it were understood that a corrupt political machine had its finger on every vote. This post originated as a response to @jkf from the other night, where he said:
What Is a Machine?
The first part of the quote betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a machine actually is, so it’s worth exploring that. Political machines maintain their power through a system of patronage. An example of how this could have been done would be that the machine boss makes sure a crony gets appointed to chair the parks department. The crony’s appointment is not based on his qualifications as an administrator as much as it is based in his ability to use his position to obtain votes for machine candidates. So he coordinates with the boss of a ward full of poor Italian immigrants to get them all maintenance jobs. He coordinates with another ward boss to make sure that a prominent and loyal contractor in his ward gets a no-bid contract for facility renovation that will provide a ton of work to the Polish and Hungarian immigrants in his ward. And then when election time rolls around the ward boss makes sure everybody knows who they have to thank for all of this largesse and that if the machine loses control to the reformers the first thing that will happen is that they’ll get cut off. That’s just one example but there are all kinds of favors politicians can do to help normal people, down to anodyne stuff like helping them navigate bureaucracy through a few well-placed phone calls; stuff that’s so anodyne that (good) politicians still do it today. And it goes without saying that if you dare elect an opponent to lead your ward, all those services get cut off, and in the next election the machine pick will point to his inability to get anything done, even though that inability is machine-driven.
Of course, something has to give in a system like this, and it’s that problems never actually get solved. Richard Daley may not have been able to deal with poverty, but he was good enough at helping individual poor people that the machine never paid an electoral price for it. But the Chicago machine was an outlier in terms of longevity; machine politics started to die out in the 1930s, and the decline accelerated after the war. Historically, machines would get voted out of power during times of economic hardship in favor of reformers, as there wasn’t enough largess to distribute to keep the machine going. But the machine would normally make a comeback when things got better. The Depression meant that things didn’t get better for a long time. A lot of people needed help, there wasn’t much to go around, and local government was forced to focus on structural changes rather than individual favors. Some individual machines weren’t directly affected, but reforms at the state and Federal level in areas like the civil service and contract requirements gradually eroded away the machines’ ability to operate.
The upshot of all of this is that machines aren’t “faceless and anonymous” entities. Their very nature prevents them from being so. Handing out anonymous favors may be good as an act of charity, but it’s a terrible way to buy votes for your party. And when somebody sees that the town has gone to shit and wants to challenge the status quo, what do you do? Send them an anonymous threat? No; anyone trying to challenge a political machine must be aware of the fact that the machine runs the town and the machine will crush them if they try to interfere and if they’re smart enough to run the town then they’re smart enough to geta nice sinecure and maybe someday they’ll get the keys to the executive washroom. From Boss Tweed in the early days to Richard Daly at the tail end of the machine era, everyone knew who was in charge, and if they didn’t, the boss wouldn’t hesitate to let them know.
The Pittsburgh Machine
I can’t speak to every city in which fraud was alleged, but I live in SWPA and can provide a pretty detailed picture of how Pittsburgh’s government works. First, unless otherwise stated, everyone named here is a Democrat; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1930s and that’s just the way it is. It’s also what gives rise to accusations of machine politics. But hear me out. There are 3 big players in Pittsburgh politics: The mayor, the Allegheny County Executive, and the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. The current mayor is Ed Gainey, a former state rep who beat incumbent Bill Peduto in the 2021 primary. Peduto didn’t seek the committee’s nomination and he accordingly didn’t get it; Gainey won it over Tony Moreno, a MAGA Democrat and former cop who thought Peduto was too soft on the 2020 protestors (of which we had relatively few that became problematic). Peduto also didn’t campaign, but nonetheless managed to win 39% of the vote to Gainey’s 46%, a testament to either the cluelessness of the electorate or the unwillingness of Peduto’s white, upper middle class base to support a black progressive reformer like Gainey or a cretin like Moreno. Gainey’s election was both surprising and not surprising at the same time. Had Peduto done anything to indicate that he actually wanted to be mayor he would have easily won. Before becoming mayor himself, Peduto made a name for himself by mercilessly criticizing the two previous mayors from his position on city council representing the wealthiest part of town.
Peduto was mayor during the 2020 election, but that is of little consequence since the city doesn’t run elections, the county does. The County Executive is (and was) Rich Fitzgerald. He was elected in 2011 after beating Mark Patrick Flaherty in the primary and Republican D. Raja in the general. Flaherty was County Controller, the son of a judge, nephew of a former mayor, and that isn’t the half of it. Fitzgerald was a county councilman. Fitzgerald won by about ten points. Allegheny County operates differently than other counties. Most counties in PA are run by three elected commissioners and there are a slew of row offices like prothonotary, register of wills, etc. Allegheny County’s system was dysfunctional and dominated by city interests so a home rule charter was adopted in 1999 that would put power in the hands of a unified executive and a geographically-based council. Most row offices were eliminated and replaced by civil service employees. The county runs the elections.
Finally, there’s the Democratic Committee. In theory this has over 2600 members (one man and one woman from each precinct), but in reality many of these seats are vacant since not all precincts can find enough people to fill their allotment. Most committee elections involve fewer than 1000 participants, and if you live in a precinct with a vacant spot, they’ll pretty much give it to you. The committee’s main job is (obviously) to get Democrats elected, but they also endorse primary candidates. And it’s currently a mess. Ahead of the 2020 election, there were a number of stories about how the committee had a MAGA problem; some committee members were making Facebook posts supporting right-wing policies, and committee leadership was ambivalent. Then the committee went on to endorse some of these MAGA sympathizers in local races over progressive candidates. With Peduto not seeking their endorsement, nearly 40% of the committee voted to endorse former cop and current asshole Tony Moreno for mayor. With Fitzgerald’s time as executive coming to a close, the committee is endorsing moderate and longtime county Treasurer John Weinstein. Mayor Gainey, however, has endorsed progressive state legislator Sara Innamorato. But the board failed to endorse incumbent DA Stephen Zappala in favor of the more progressive Matt Dugan. And no one has yet endorsed longtime city Controller Michael Lamb for County Executive, even though he’s from a prominent political family that includes his nephew, former US Rep Conor Lamb.
If this is supposed to be some kind of machine, it’s a pretty dysfunctional one. Politicians with long pedigrees can’t get endorsements. Politicians who endorse views antithetical to the party platform do get endorsements. Politicians with endorsements lose primary elections. Prominent figures in the party can’t agree on whom to endorse. Mayors tend to be replaced by their strongest critics. This group was supposed to have participated in the rigging of a presidential election? They couldn’t rig an election for dogcatcher. This isn’t because they’re incompetent, it’s because this is the way the system is supposed to operate.
I have no particular claims regarding the 2020 election, but the 1997 Miami mayor race in which Xavier Suarez was removed from office for ballot fraud is probably the most obvious recent memory example of what some are claiming happened. Per the wiki article:
The 1997 race was particularly recent during the 2000 election controversy in Florida. I have no information regarding more recent elections, but while I'd like to think it can't happen these days it doesn't seem completely impossible.
A bit further back than 1997, but still after the purported demise of the machine politics era, the grand jury report for the 1982 Chicago election is informative on the different fraud strategies used to generate over 100,000 fraudulent votes in the midterms that year. The specific strategies included
Absent voter canvassing - paid canvassers who were supposed to correct voter rolls instead used canvassing to identify voters who had died, moved, or had no intention of voting as targets for fraudulent votes.
Fraudulent use of absentee registration - precinct captains and canvassers would convince residents to sign up for absentee ballots, then fill out the ballots themselves voting party line
Paying drunks, homeless and aliens to vote
Manually altering the vote counts
Harvesting ballots from nursing homes
Of those methods, manually altering the vote counts is more difficult now. The other methods are no more difficult or much, much easier to pull off. In the 41 years since then, we have expanded the mail-in vote to be broad enough to cover everyone. Ballot harvesting is now explicitly legal in quite a few jurisdictions with minimum verifications in place to ensure that the ballots are actually cast by the person on the registration card. In jurisdictions where it is illegal, there is an awful lot of wink and nod non-enforcement.
Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.
While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.
Number one doesn't work anymore (at least in Pennsylvania) since maintaining voter rolls isn't the responsibility of the parties. In PA when someone dies the department of vital records notifies the county election board within 60 days so they can be removed from the rolls. Obviously people who recently died or died out of state can still slip through, but we aren't talking huge numbers of people. As for the fraudulent absentee registrations, I think that widespread mail-in voting actually makes it less likely for this kind of fraud to happen. Absentee balloting used to be rare enough that unscrupulous people could take advantage of the lack of familiarity with the system. If someone from your own party came to your door and told you about an easier way to vote that you weren't familiar with, it might seem okay that, yeah, just give the ballot to him, he'll mark all the Democrats for me. In the run up to the 2020 election there was a media blitz about how to properly fill out mail ballots. There were news stories on regularly, and I got tons of emails from both the party and the election commission with instructions on how to request and fill mine out, just in case I decided to vote by mail.
Registration fraud I'm not worried about because registration forms require enough verifiable information that it would be impossible to register enough fake applicants at scale to make it worthwhile. At the very least, you need to be able to match a name with a state ID# or Social and the kind of person willing to give that information to a stranger apropo of nothing probably isn't the kind of person you can rely on to provide accurate information.
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That Jury Report lists the use of a computer to check whether deceased people voted or whether people voted twice as a novel investigative technique used by the FBI. They say the FBI targeted precincts where lots of people voted twice or where dead people voted and then checked the handwriting of precinct officials against the handwriting on ballots cast twice. Once that started they were able to get lots of people to flip and testify.
That's one way technology makes this all harder. Fraudulent absentee scheme and ballot harvesting are going to have some error rate where double ballots get cast and if a whole bunch of them are cast in one precinct then that suggests that a lot is going on. Just scrolling through Heritage.org's list of voter fraud convictions there's tons of people who got caught voting in two states or for their dead relatives. It's just a much harder crime to pull off in an era of digital voter rolls and databases of obituaries.
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Before the 2020 election, the Republicans' campaign for tougher rules against voter fraud focussed on the rarest type of voter fraud - retail in-person voter fraud such as non-citizen immigrants registering and voting - and conspicuously ignored postal vote fraud. This doesn't necessarily mean that the Republicans expected to benefit from postal vote fraud - it is more likely that they were worried about military being tossed on technicalities as a result of harsh laws against postal vote fraud, in the same way that the Democrats are worried about Republican voter-ID laws which de facto require a driving license to vote disenfranchising poor urbanites.
If the Republicans thought that the Democrats routinely committed postal vote fraud of the type they are now complaining about, the True the Vote crowd would have spent more time talking about it.
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I tried to find numbers for the magnitude of that shitshow, but this was the best I got.
Now the invalidation was technically for the initial election, not the runoff, but I think it's safe to expect similar turnout. That suggests in an election with circa 50,000 votes, the state was not only able to find various examples, but publicize and prosecute them. But in 2020, despite having 3,000x the number of ballots, such cases were vanishingly rare.
It's not at all impossible. Just improbable.
Yes, plus you'd expect the personnel involved and the potential for whistleblowers to increase dramatically. You'd also need to avoid producing statistical irregularities by overstuffing in certain places so you'd have to coordinate between different groups. The complexity is just much higher.
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How many sting operations were conducted by the FBI? How many undercover agents acted as fake poll workers in Atlanta and Miami?
No idea. It sounds like the commission relied on overwhelming witness testimony.
Why do you ask?
If you are not actively searching from within the process, almost all fraud will be invisible to you. There is a reason the only time the Chicago machine was ever caught was due to a disgruntled fraudster outing them. Its because voting is inscrutable the way it is done in urban environments.
So why didn't that apply in the very urban, very visible Miami case?
It should be strictly harder to organize a national voter fraud campaign with no leaks even in the face of considerable public and private effort.
Not national, just a lot of local things like this: friendly outreach organizations signing homeless up for the rolls using the charity's own address. Is there a plausible good faith explanation for this? Sure! Is it a gaping opportunity for vote fraud? Also yes!
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Why would it be national? It would just happen every year. The people who end up getting caught typically get snitched on.
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