“Vote early, vote often” is one of Chicago’s unofficial mottos. One of the most corrupt cities in America is famous for its voter fraud back in the day, but officials now insist that everything is on the down low and technology has helped wipe out voter fraud.
Well, investigators at the local CBS station found that “119 dead people have voted a total of 229 times in Chicago in the last decade” after they merged the “Chicago Board of Election voter histories with the death master file from the Social Security Administration.”
Jim Allen, a city election board spokesman, says a majority of those dead voters were most likely clerical errors, involving family members with the same names and addresses.“This is not the bad old days,” Allen says. “There are just a few instances here where a father came in for a son, or a neighbor was given the wrong ballot application and signed it.”
That’s interesting because family members of these dead people disagree.
Investigators said Tadeusz Ciesla voted in 2010, but his nephew Marek Ciesla said he died in 1998:
“That’s a fraud,” he says.
Earl Smith reported his father’s death in 1997, but he “has voted twice after he died.”
Robert Sallee insists he has told the election board multiple times about his mother’s death in 1998. The investigation revealed she voted twelve years later:
“They’re just not taking her off the rolls,” he says.
CBS said that Victor Croswell has voted six times since he passed away in 1994. Floyd Stevens has voted eleven times since he died in 1993.
With Chicago’s past, it’s hard not to believe that voter fraud exists. After all, Chicago allegedly gave John F. Kennedy the presidency in 1960 against Richard Nixon. The records show that President Kennedy beat Nixon “by 9,000 votes in Illinois by capturing what some considered a suspiciously high 450,000 advantage in Cook County.”
But before that, Mayor Anton Cermak instilled the “Democratic Machine,” which “ensured voters picked the right candidates, and the people who worked in it weren’t shy about using money, bribes or fake identities to get votes for Democrats.” One way to do it? By keeping dead people on the electoral rolls:
Electoral rolls are supposed to keep track of who is registered to vote. The rolls would be rigged so dead people’s names still appeared on them, [journalist Bob] Crawford said, meaning others could vote for the candidate of their choice in the dead person’s name.Sometimes, people working for the Machine would even go into cemeteries and take the names off of tombstones, then go back and fill out voter registration cards with the dead person’s names as if they were still alive, Crawford said.
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