Political Satire: Having trouble surviving these times? You’re not alone. Join us in columnist John F. Di Leo’s exploration of an alternate universe, where we imagine the impossible:
An idealistic teenager, living in the 51st ward of a fictional city in middle America, volunteers at the local party headquarters, and learns a lesson or two about modern urban politics.
Little Pavel Has A Senior Moment
by John F. Di Leo
Left alone at a work table at party headquarters, young Pavel Syerov Jr. (Paul to his friends) had been collating literature and listening to country music on his radio for an hour, while Pockets, the deputy committeeman, was on the phone in the back office. When he heard Pockets emerge at last, Pavel quickly changed the station back to NPR and asked “So what’s up, Pockets?”
“Gotta deliver a floppy disk to a nursing home. Ya got another hour or two to join me, Paully?”
“A floppy disk? Do you mean maybe a CD, Pockets?” Pavel knew that the old pol’s jargon was a mixture of several eras, so interpreting his speech was sometimes a bit touch-and-go.
“Yeah, right. CD. Whatever. So can ya join me? It couldn’t hurt to show a little young blood when we make this call.” Pockets dropped his voice before continuing. “It’s a new guy, who just took over management of one of the nursing homes in the 5th precinct. Gotta deliver the format we need their voting info on.”
Pavel looked at him quizzically. “Um, Pockets, you know you can just email the format, right? Whatever you want from him, you can just email him the blank Excel file and tell him to populate it. No need to hand-deliver anything.” Pockets just didn’t want to get with the 21st century. Pavel began to elucidate on the ease of transferring data in the information age.
“It’s not like twenty years ago, when you’d reach 750 kb of data and have to insert a new diskette, Pockets. With high speed internet connections and modern computers, you can transfer all that stuff back and forth by email now. You never have to leave headquarters if you don’t want to!”
Pockets chuckled, as it was now his chance to explain the ways of the world to his young charge. “I know I could email it, Paully. In fact, I emailed it last week. The thing is, I can’t be sure he’ll do what we need until we pay our little visit in person. He’s new, see? So it would be helpful if you’d accompany me. Just stay in the back and don’t say anything. Or if you do, speak in Russian.”
This was unusual. “I didn’t know you spoke Russian, Pockets!”
“I don’t. I’m just sayin’, if you say anything, say it in Russian.”
“Oh… so, does the nursing home owner speak Russian?”
“I sincerely doubt it,” chuckled Pockets. “The Russian language, when spoken, just conveys a certain somethin’ that I’d like to convey right now, that’s all.”
Not normally so slow on the uptake, Pavel was beginning to catch on. This was no ordinary delivery. He was being asked to help deliver a threat. His parents had told him that volunteering at party headquarters this summer would be more educational than summer school; they just hadn’t told him how, so every day was doubly enlightening.
“Level with me, Pockets. What are we doing today?”
Pockets sat down and opened a beer as he began the day’s lecture. “Nursing homes, senior citizen apartments, assisted living centers, whatever you want to call them (I’m sure there are subtle differences between them, Paully, but I don’t really care), are an important part of our operation. Put as simply as possible… they have voters, and we have carrots and sticks.”
“Sorry, Pockets, I don’t get it. Are they wealthy donors?”
“Well, son, yes, they’re not wealthy, but a nursing home owner is always good for some bucks, but that’s just a side benefit. The important thing is the votes they deliver. Say there are 200 people in a nursing home. Maybe fifty would vote intelligently on their own – for the purposes of this discussion, let’s call it 25 GOP, and 25 Dem. What does that mean?”
“It means a 25% turnout, with no net benefit to us. Unacceptable, right, Pockets?”
“Absolutely right. Unacceptable. But another fifty are probably capable of voting if somebody reminds them and helps them down to the polling place… and the other hundred are so out of it on election day, either from Alzheimer’s, weakness in general, sleeping through the day, or all their mind-altering medications, that somebody could cast a vote on their behalf, and nobody would ever know the difference. That’s what you call Opportunity, my boy!”
“So, the home’s owner is responsible for delivering more votes from the precinct than we’d normally get, by prodding them along, and so forth?”
“How he does it is no business of ours, son. We don’t micromanage. We just remind our contact… might be the owner, or the general manager, or some other contact on the ground… that we need him to make sure we get every vote that we’ve got coming to us. Some of ‘em run a regular campaign of their own onsite… passing out the flyers and holding town meetings with the legislative candidates; though of course this depends on the people casting those secret ballots the right way. We’ve been surprised sometimes that way, so we prefer locking in our results.”
“How do you do that, Pockets?”
“This is gonna sound cruel son, and I’m sorry, but… half these residents don’t know what they did yesterday, what with the memory loss and the illness and the meds. If you ask them tomorrow whether they voted in the election yesterday, ya think they’ll admit that they never voted, or don’t remember if they voted or not? Nope, they’ll join in our ruse and say ‘Sure I voted! Never missed one!’ So it’s really easier for everybody if we just make sure they all do their civic duty and move on.”
“How do we do it, Pockets? Do we force them, or forge their signatures, or what?”
“It varies from place to place, son. Like everything else, you do what fits the circumstances. At some precincts, we just cast absentee ballots on behalf of the ones who we know won’t vote on their own. At others, we mark their ballots during the lulls on election day and check them off as having voted as the day goes by. At some, the rolls are full of old patients who’ve moved away or died, but are still on the rolls; we can just vote their ballots for them. At some, the voters really show up, but they’re so out of it, they need help, and our judges just accompany them to the booth, and fill out their ballots for them as they nod. In some precincts, that’s half the voters!”
Now Pavel was genuinely perplexed. “But doesn’t there have to be both a Republican election judge and a Democrat election judge, together, to help somebody in the booth, so that neither party can lead the voter one way or the other?”
“You think there are Republican election judges in these precincts, Paully?” Pockets snickered, as he opened another beer. “The GOP figures they can’t win these precincts anyway, so they don’t send anybody in. The machine has to fill all five seats ourselves; we just have two of our judges wear the GOP badge so that the paperwork complies.”
“Are all five judges in on the game, Pockets?” Pavel couldn’t believe all five would be complicit in such outright theft.
“No, but they don’t hafta be, son. If we have two, or preferably three, cooperative judges, they can make sure any goody-two-shoes judges stationed there with ‘em don’t see what’s going on. You can sneak a lot of things right past somebody’s nose, and nobody’ll notice a thing.”
“And every nursing home is involved?” The scope was staggering.
“No, of course not. I’m sure there are a lot of them that don’t have a thing to do with it. But enough, Paully, enough. I dunno, thirty percent? Forty? Fifty? Beats me. All I know is that it happens, enough to be an important part of our strategy. Has been for as long as I can remember. Hey, anytime you can go to a precinct of 200 and turn a 25-25 split into a 175-25 rout, you’ve had a good day!”
“What’s in it for the nursing home management, Pockets? Why do they go along with it?”
“Lots of reasons. Maybe they’re true believers themselves, or they came up from out of the machine. Maybe they got their nursing home license under the table because they’re felons or they lack the right personnel or something… or maybe the alderman might be uncooperative in helping them evade penalties for zoning or electrical code violations or something. Maybe they’re claiming minority ownership to qualify for some city, county, state, or federal grant, and we know that the minority “owner” is just a front for somebody else, and they’d lose the business if found out. And of course, there’s also places where the management has absolutely nothing to do with it, and the judges handle it all for us. It’s a mix.”
Another lightbulb lit up over Pavel’s head as he saw an apparent flaw in the plan. “Wait a minute, Pockets, this doesn’t make sense. Let’s say the statewide turnout in an election is 40%. You can’t have a precinct with 100% turnout, it’ll stick out like a sore thumb to the regulators!”
“What regulators?” snorted Pockets. “There’s always a variety of turnout from precinct to precinct. But think about it. How do you absolutely guarantee a high turnout? How do you think you practically force people to vote, whether they want to or not?”
“Umm… for half the uninterested electorate, I guess you’d have to hold the vote in their own house to get them to vote, especially in a midterm election.”
“Exactly,” smiled Pockets. “And ya know where we put our polling places, whenever we can? In nursing homes! Every chance we can get. In their front halls, their meeting rooms, or in the cafeteria itself. Everybody goes there!“
Nice of them, isn’t it? To hold the election in the one place where even the bedridden, or those encumbered with IVs and other equipment, would still be able to show up. A proper, well-intentioned, good-government plan.
And now, Pavel realized, this good-government approach was being used for the most dishonest of election tactics. Wow.
“So… while a 100% turnout would attract attention if the polling place was a school, or a church, or a mall… it won’t even raise an eyebrow if the polling place is an old people’s home, where there’s virtually no resident ever away on vacation, or traveling for business, or whatever usually keeps people away. Heck, even if you’re too sick to cross the street, you can be wheeled down the hall… so a high turnout there is just to be expected!” Pockets just smiled.
Pavel considered. “If somebody wanted to stop this kind of vote fraud, what would they need to do?”
“Well, Paully, what do you think? You’re a smart boy. You tell me.”
“Stop allowing nursing homes to be polling places at all, because of the risk of fraud… and find some way to mandate that both parties really have their own judges at the polling places, rather than allowing one party to fill all five posts? And make sure that you have good pollwatchers… maybe lawyers… at every precinct, especially the high risk ones?”
“Exactly, Paully. That’d do it for sure. But Republican lawyers are too busy at their private sector jobs, defending their employers from class action lawsuits and ambulance chasers, to have time to take a day off to pollwatch from 6:00am until midnight. And the GOP can’t find two judges for lots of our precincts… they sometimes can’t find two judges in an entire ward! And if they pass some rule that we can’t use nursing homes, intensive care centers, and other rehabilitation service centers as polling places, what do think we do next?”
“Um, we’d probably hold a press conference shouting that the GOP is making it harder for old and sick people to vote. That the GOP is anti-senior citizen. That the GOP is prejudiced against the sick and poor. Right?”
“You’re catching on, Paully! And we’d recruit ACORN, and the local churches, and the AARP, to join us… That’s how we win, year after year. Polls and surveys don’t mean a thing, as long as we control the elections.”
Pavel sat down and thought for a minute. His eyes wandered to a nearby newspaper, where headlines announced another strong poll for the GOP, indicating plenty of likely GOP pickups statewide. “But this is still gonna be a bad year for us. We’ll lose state rep seats, state senate seats, and they’ll sweep the constitutional offices and US Senate and every swing Congressional race.”
Pockets chuckled again. “Oh, we’ll lose some legislative seats in the suburbs and downstate, sure. But don’t be too sure about the rest.”
“But the GOP could pick up twenty points over their 2006 and 2008 numbers statewide. You’ve seen the polls.”
“Paully, did you ever notice what I do when I see a headline that the Sox lost a game?”
“Yeah, you rip up the sports section and throw it in the garbage.”
“Right. Why didn’t I do the same thing to that newspaper with the article about the bad polls? Because it’s worth saving; it has information we need.”
Again Pavel’s eyebrows raised as he understood. “You need to know exactly how much the GOP will pick up honestly downstate, so we know how much we have to steal in Chicago?”
“And elsewhere.” Pockets chuckled and finished his beer. “Well, that’s that. Ready to go pay a visit to a funeral home? We have a roster to update.”
Copyright 2010 John F. Di Leo
This is a work of fiction, and any similarity with any person, living or dead, is unintentional. The Tales of Little Pavel were originally published in serial form in Illinois Review, from 2010 through 2016, and the full collection of stories about Little Pavel and the denizens of the 51st Ward is available in paperback or eBook, exclusively from Amazon. Republished with permission.
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available only on Amazon, in either paperback or eBook. His newest one, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Three,” was just published in November, 2023.
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