by Adam Cohen
Daley reacted forcefully to the Republican accusations. “The people of Chicago are just as honorable and honest as any section of the state,” he insisted, and the Republicans had offered up nothing more than “Hitler type” propaganda in support of their allegations. The Democrats welcomed a statewide recount and would even help pay for one, he told reporters. What it would show, he said, was that the voting irregularities were at least as widespread in Republican strongholds downstate as they were in Chicago. “In certain counties, the results are so fantastically, overwhelmingly Republican that there might have been error in their eagerness,” Daley said confidently. “You look at some of those downstate counties and it’s just as fantastic as some of those precincts they’re pointing at in Chicago.” Daley detected a nefarious anti-Kennedy conspiracy behind the vote-fraud charges. “It’s a joint effort by Republican conservatives in the north and Dixiecrats in the south to prevent the man elected by the people from becoming President of the United States,” he insisted. 38
There were several recanvasses and recounts of the Chicago voting, at the urging of the Republicans. A reexamination of so-called D&O ballots, those that had been marked “defective” or “objected to,” and defective voting machines, showed a moderate but unmistakable pattern of errors in favor of the Democrat in both the presidential and state’s attorney races. A recount of ballots cast in the 906 Cook County precincts that still used paper ballots revealed an even clearer pattern of mistakes working in favor of the machine slate. The Democrat-dominated Board of Election Commissioners and the Republican vote counters disagreed over how to interpret various kinds of disputed ballots, and the two groups ended up with widely differing tallies. The discrepancy was not surprising, given that the Board of Election Commissioners included in its ranks a chairman who had long machine ties, Daley’s corporation counsel, and a newly elected county judge whom Daley had personally slated for his judgeship. Despite its bias in favor of the machine, even the Board of Election Commissioners conceded when the recanvass ended December 9 that Nixon had gained 943 votes in the process and Adamowski had picked up 6,186. The Republicans contended that the recanvass had produced an additional 4,500 votes for Nixon, and 13,000 for Adamowski. In some precincts, the errors were large and fairly suspicious. In the 57th precinct of the 31st Ward — which just happened to be Tom Keane’s home turf — the first tally gave Kennedy 323 votes and Nixon 78, but the recanvass found that Kennedy had only 237 votes and Nixon actually had 162. In the same precinct, Ward’s victory margin plunged by two-thirds in the recount. If the Republican count was correct, this canvass of less than one-third of the Cook County precincts, looking at only one particular kind of voting irregularity, had erased more than half of both Kennedy’s and Ward’s margins of victory. 39
Although these initial recounts suggested serious flaws in the reported election results, the Republican challenges to the election went nowhere. A Republican national committeewoman filed a suit in Cook County Circuit Court. The case was assigned to Judge Thomas Kluczynski, a machine loyalist who less than a year later would be appointed to the Federal District Court on Daley’s recommendation. Not surprisingly, on December 13, Kluczynski summarily dismissed the Republicans’ case. Taking another tack, the Republicans tried to convince the State Electoral Board not to certify Illinois’s electoral votes for Kennedy. The Republicans presented written evidence and called witnesses to support their fraud claim. Daley personally delivered the Democratic response. The election had been “more closely supervised than any in recent years,” he insisted. “We in Chicago are no better or no worse than the rest of the State,” Daley told the board. “They could allege fraud about results in Grundy County, Moline, they could allege the same thing in Du-Page County, and that has been alleged, but I say to you people who allege fraud, come up with the evidence.” The board rejected the Republican appeal. It did not affirmatively decide that the election had been clean or that the Democratic ticket actually had won more votes. It simply decided that the Republicans had not put forth enough solid evidence of fraud to justify the extraordinary step of setting aside a presidential election in the state. Illinois’s votes were duly cast for Kennedy when the electors met in Springfield on December 19, 1960. 40
If Daley and the machine did steal the election for Kennedy, it would not, by itself, have changed the outcome. Kennedy ended up prevailing in the Electoral College 303–219 (with fifteen votes cast by independent “Dixiecrat” voters from the Deep South for Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia), a wide enough margin that he would have been elected even if Illinois had gone Republican. But Daley and the machine could not have known that on election night, when the presidential race looked like a dead heat. If they were stealing votes for Kennedy on election night, it meant that they were willing to steal the White House as casually as they would have stolen an aldermanic seat. In his memoirs, Nixon explains why he decided not to contest the Illinois results. He was concerned that a challenge to the legitimacy of a presidential race would have hurt the nation’s standing in the world, he says. Perhaps more sincere was the other reason he gave: his concern that if he did contest the result “[c]harges of ‘sore loser’ would follow me through history and remove any possibility of a further political career.” Although he did not participate in the challenge to the Illinois result, Nixon seemed to believe he had been robbed by the Democratic machine. A vivid but electorally inaccurate comment by Pat Nixon about the head of the Chicago Board of Elections probably expressed Nixon’s own views: “If it weren’t for an evil, cigar-smoking man in Chicago, Sidney T. Holzman, my husband would have been President of the United States.” 41
Was the election stolen? There have always been those in Chicago who have sworn it was. Curtis Foster was a bodyguard for West Side alderman Benjamin Lewis and president of the 24th Ward Organization. The once heavily Jewish 24th Ward was by 1960 poor and black, and it was precisely the kind of loyal machine ward where vote theft was reported to be routine. In the Kennedy-Nixon election, it produced some of the most eye-catching returns for the Democratic ticket. Kennedy carried it by 24,211 to 2,131 — getting almost 92 percent of the vote — and Ward bested Adamowski by 23,440 to 2,190. 42 Andre Foster recalls sitting in his father’s polling place in a barbershop on Roosevelt Road that night when someone came to the door after the polls had closed. “Some guy knocked on the door and said, ‘We need thirty more votes,’” recalls Foster. “I heard him say it.” And, says Foster, “If they gave him an order to get thirty more votes, they gave a lot of people the order.” Precinct captains often stole votes for the machine, according to Foster, and they certainly did on November 8, 1960. If the precinct captain then fabricated the required number of votes, depending on how he did it, it might well not have been detected in the minimal recanvasses conducted afterward, checking paper ballots against the number of votes on tally sheets. 43
The 1960 election would certainly not have been the first in which a political machine stole votes on a massive scale. For as long as there have been machines in America, there have been creative methods of making the votes work out right on election night. In the pivotal 1886 New York City mayoral election, Tammany Hall kept control of City Hall by simply throwing out votes cast for United Labor Party candidate Henry George. For days after the election, uncounted ballots for George could be seen floating down the Hudson River. Chicago politicians have historically been as resourceful in this regard as any. In Chicago’s very first mayoral election, the winning Democratic candidate was accused of stealing the election — by an indignant Whig Party. In the 1880s, about half of the city’s polling places were located in saloons, where Democratic votes could easily be bought off in exchange for a “liquid reward.” And in 1935, more than one hundred election officials were sentenced to jail for fraud. 44 Finley Peter Dunne, the Chicago journalist who spoke through his fictional alter ego saloonkeeper-philosopher Mr. Dooley, recalled his own days as a precinct captain in the 6th Ward: “I mind th’ time whin we r-roll
ed ip twinty-siven hundred dimocratic votes in this wan precinct an’ th’ only wans that voted was th’ judges iv election an’ th’ captains.” Traditional machine methods included casting ballots for noncitizens, copying signatures of drunks off flophouse registration books, and, of course, voting the dead. In the Chicago vernacular, voter fraud fell into two categories: “running up the count,” and “leveling the count.” Leveling the count occurred after the polls closed. After tallying the votes, election judges would reduce the votes for Republican and independent candidates to some predetermined level, and shift those votes into the Democratic column. Running up the count occurred in many ways, limited only by the ingenuity of individual precinct captains and machine workers. “It was the easiest thing in the world to do in the old machine,” says Andre Foster, who helped his precinct captain father work the 24th Ward. “My father did it and I did it.” 45
Just how Chicago vote theft worked — and how commonly it occurred — was laid bare in 1972 by a Chicago Tribune investigative series that won the paper a Pulitzer Prize. Machine functionaries knew that if they did not produce the vote totals Daley expected from them they were likely to be “vised,” or removed from office. As one article in the series explained in a headline, “Vote Stealing Boils Down to Precinct Chief Survival.” Precinct captains were under pressure to run up the count however they could — ghost voting, bribing voters with groceries or whiskey, getting machine partisans to vote “early and often,” or literally stuffing the ballot box. Given that the machine controlled the Chicago Board of Elections, which was supposed to protect against this kind of malfeasance, there was little to stand in the way. To report its 1972 series, the Tribune sent reporters and investigators from a Chicago good-government group to observe polling places firsthand on election day. The worst suspicions of the machine’s critics were confirmed, and Daley’s repeated denials were convincingly refuted. 46
Voting fraud began on registration day. Daley regularly preached about the critical importance of registering voters. A good machine precinct captain went door-to-door to every home in his district to make sure that every eligible adult was registered, and whenever possible registered as a Democrat. But the machine often took this registration process a step further. It turned out that precinct captains made it a practice of stopping by skid row hotels and copying names out of the registration books. These skid row denizens, many of whom were alcoholics, transients, or mentally unstable, were not likely to vote on their own, so the machine could simply vote a straight Democratic ticket on their behalf. As part of his reporting, Bill Recktenwald, a Tribune reporter who worked on the vote fraud series, moved into transient hotels and flophouses that charged $7.25 a week for tiny “cubicle rooms.” He registered under false names like Henry David Thoreau, Jay Gatsby, and James Joyce. One of the hotels he moved into was the McCoy Hotel, owned at the time by Charles Swibel, chairman of the board of the Chicago Housing Authority, and a close political ally of Daley’s. The hotel was located in the ward in which Edward Quigley, Daley’s sewer commissioner and a pillar of the machine, was ward committeeman. Recktenwald watched as precinct 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,” he recalls. When he checked the registration rolls, he saw that he had been among those involuntarily signed up to vote. “James Joyce became a registered voter at the McCoy Hotel.” 47
One reason vote theft was so easy was the imbalance between the two parties in Chicago. Every ward theoretically had both Democratic and Republican ward organizations, each headed by its own ward committeeman. But in many wards the Republican leadership was weak, or had cut a deal with the Democratic machine. In the 36th Ward, Peter J. Miller was Republican ward committeeman and a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. But at the same time, Miller held a Democratic patronage job as paymaster of the Chicago Sanitary District, and regularly voted with the Democrats in the legislature on issues of importance to Daley. Many Republican ward organizations did not even have precinct captains. When Charles Percy ran for governor against machine Democrat Otto Kerner in 1964, Percy demanded that Chicago’s Republican ward committeemen produce lists of their precinct captains. It turned out that 1,500 to 2,000 of the city’s precincts did not have Republican precinct captains. 48
In his defense of the 1960 results to the State Election Board, Daley emphasized that 25,000 election judges had been present in the precincts on election day to oversee the voting. It was true that, according to state law, both Republican and Democratic election judges were to be present at every polling place. But as Daley well knew, in many Chicago wards the Democratic ward bosses selected both the Democratic and Republican judges. Despite what the election law said, it was not uncommon for all five judges in a precinct to be Democrats. In one ward, the Tribune found a mother and daughter, both Democrats, who had been recruited to serve as judges by their Democratic precinct captain. In one election, Mrs. Alla Reeves served as a Democratic judge while her daughter Beverly served as a Republican. The next year, they switched. Actual Republican judges were often turned away by the Democratic machine when they showed up at polling places. In 1972, the machine-dominated Board of Elections declined to appoint 474 Republican judges, claiming their applications had never been received. 49
Even when Republican election judges were present, the machine could usually intimidate them into doing nothing even when they saw the election law being broken. Election judges were nominally in charge of the voting on election day, but as a practical matter the Democratic precinct captains were in control. Election judges had the legal right to order a police officer to stop voter fraud, and even to make an arrest. But as a practical matter, it was not likely that a Chicago policeman would take a Republican’s side against a Democratic machine operative. On the other hand, Republican election judges knew that if they behaved, they would receive not only the official stipend of $25, but a little something extra from the Democratic precinct captain — and they would be allowed to share in the breakfast, lunch, and dinner provided by the precinct captain for his workers, rather than fend for themselves. Judges who did try to exert their authority were easily intimidated by the captain and his staff. In cases where Republican judges raised objections, Democratic captains were known to “fire” them — and remove their names from pay vouchers. In a hotly contested 1966 election, twenty-five-year-old James Hutchinson showed up at a South Side polling place as a Republican poll watcher. When he asked to inspect the voting records, he was arrested. He was kept in custody in a room in Chicago City Hall until the polls were closed, although he was never charged with any crime. One election judge reported that after she and a colleague asked too many questions at a 24th Ward polling place, three gang members showed up and asked, “What does it take to get you guys out of here, a death threat?” The gang members, who were seen talking to an assistant precinct captain, said they had been sent by “the organization.” Before they left, they told the judges, “You better be out of here by the time we come back.” It was not an idle threat. Poll watchers who interfered with the machine’s work were often roughed up. A University of Illinois student who tried to stop fraud as a poll watcher at the 14th precinct of the 24th Ward in 1972 testified before the state legislature that he had his life threatened, and then was beaten up by two Democratic workers as a Chicago policeman looked on. Wesley Spraggins, director of a West Side insurgent political group, told the same committee that while trying to keep the machine honest, his members were beaten up and received death threats, and had bricks thrown through their windows. His own dog, he said, had been poisoned. 50
With no one to keep it honest, the machine’s election-day offenses were anything but subtle. Most common was so-called four-legged voting, in which a ward heeler literally walked into the machine with the voter to make sure he voted a straight Democratic ticket. It was useful for those whose infirmity or poor com
mand of written English made them unreliable voters. But it also ensured that people whose votes the machine had bought by one means or another kept their side of the bargain. Precinct workers sometimes hovered outside the booth and intervened when a voter took more than about thirty seconds, a sign he might be splitting his vote, rather than pulling a single lever to vote the straight Democratic ticket. Ghost voters were another mainstay of machine politics — voters who were dead, had moved out of the district, or perhaps never existed at all. Before the 1972 election, the Tribune sent out a mailing to 5,495 voters listed on the registration rolls but not in the phone book. More than 10 percent were returned by the Post Office because the recipient was dead, had moved, or was unknown. Of these, sixty-two were found to be registered from vacant lots or empty buildings, even in a new supplemental list that was prepared one week before the election. No list is perfect, and part of the problem might have been that the process of purging names when voters died or moved was flawed. But the Tribune found no shortage of evidence that the machine was actually casting ballots for many of these ghost voters. Fred Tims, an elderly man with a heart condition who was too ill to vote, said that a scrawl written in the precinct binder in the 5th precinct of the 24th Ward when his vote was cast was definitely not his. In the 11th precinct of the same ward, the Tribune found four voters named “Mitchell” whose names, according to a handwriting expert, were all forged by the same person. 51 In the 23rd precinct of the 25th Ward, Elizabeth Roland, nominally a Republican judge, tried to vote although she was not listed in the precinct binder. A poll watcher from a nonpartisan civic group challenged her attempt to vote, pointing out that it would have violated the election law. But when the poll watcher stepped away to make a phone call, Roland voted, giving as her address 2117 W. Roosevelt Road, a nonexistent address. 52