Political Machines – Power & Control Mean More Fraud

When it comes to maintaining political and administrative control of a city, county or state, the U.S. has seen its fair share of political machines. Two well-known examples of a “political machine” are Tammany Hall, a New York City political organization that spanned nearly two centuries, and Richard Daley and the Cook County, IL Democrat Party. 

Formed in 1789, Tammany Hall’s leadership was often identical to the Executive Committee of the local Democrat party and controlled virtually every element of the electoral process in New York City and eventually the state of New York. Its tactics included repeated voting, shifting voters between wards, fraudulent naturalization papers for immigrants which allowed them to vote, the destruction of opposition ballots and simply changing vote counts. 

Tammany Hall became the model for political machines in other cities where they ignored voter rights while enriching politicians and machine members through graft at taxpayers’ expense. The machines controlled not only the voters within their districts but also the voting process, i.e., established polling places, printed ballots, counted ballots and decided who could and could not vote. The results of elections were often preordained by machine politics with advance notice of how many votes would be needed.

Fast-forward to today. Not much has changed… it’s just gotten worse and, in some respects, the cheating is more sophisticated and difficult to detect, i.e., Dominion voting machines. And America’s “one day of voting” now goes on for weeks/months thanks to mail-in ballots in some states which has incentivized ballot harvesting resulting in more fraud. A 2012 report in The New York Times noted that voter fraud involving mail-in ballots “is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud.” In fact, in the last four elections, more than 28 million ballots went missing.