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 Goes to the Back of the Bus
by John F. Di Leo
Pockets stumbled into headquarters one morning holding his briefcase in one hand, holding his head in the other. “Paully, gimme a lemon-lime, willya?”
Pavel Syerov Jr. (Paul to his friends) arose from the table where he had been collating literature and headed back to the refrigerator for a can of soda for the deputy committeeman. Gently, he asked “Rough night last night, Pockets?” He had never seen Pockets hung over before; beer was mother’s milk to the old pol. But Pockets and the Boss had been entertaining a couple of politicians from Louisiana the night before at the corner bar; old pros swapping stories and learning tricks of the trade.
“Never mix your drinks, Paully” he told his young charge, in his most fatherly tone. “It’s those guys from New Orleans. They take perfectly good fish and burn the flavor out of it, and then they drink the sweetest, fruitiest concoctions you’ve ever seen. Boy, do you feel it in the morning…” Pockets collapsed in his chair and shut his eyes before beginning the day’s lecture.
“Do you have your driver’s license yet, Paully?” Pockets asked.
“Not yet, Pockets… I’m only 17, remember? Just finished Driver’s Ed in June.”
“Okay, then you’ll have it by the election; that’s what counts. Make sure you get the kind that lets you drive a bus. We might… just might… hafta send you south for the election; they’re short on bus drivers in New Orleans ever since Katrina hit, and who knows; they just might be looking for some help from their friends.”
“A bus, Pockets? That’s a different test! And a much more complicated one! I can barely drive a car, and you want me driving a bus by November?” Honestly, thought Pavel, there are times to question the old man’s judgment.
“We don’t think big enough in Chicago, Paully. Those New Orleans boys told us about what they call ‘the Morial method.’ I don’t think we can do it here, mind you, but they’ve sure got a slick operation down in the delta!”
Pavel offered Pockets a bagel and asked him to slow down. “I think you’re getting ahead of me, Pockets. How exactly does this New Orleans technique work?”
Pockets smiled. “You’re gonna like this, Paully. They tell me it was mastered by the old mayor of New Orleans, though it kinda sounds like it already an old established practice by his day. Let’s say you only have 45 workers. Now, we might divvy them up by putting three each in fifteen precincts; they could do a good job for us, right? Get a couple dozen more votes in each of those fifteen precincts when the other judges aren’t watching, right?”
“Sure, Pockets. That’s how we do it.” Pavel was learning all kinds of tricks in his summer, volunteering at headquarters.
“Well, Paully, that’s nothing. See, in New Orleans what they do is take a school bus and fill it chock full of patronage workers at 6:00am, then have a sharp guy from headquarters drive them around town all day, carrying marked pollsheets for as many precincts as they can squeeze into a day. Ten? Twenty? Thirty?” Pockets chuckled and munched his bagel. “In a big city, the sky’s the limit… as long as you keep your ‘volunteers’ well-nourished. In New Orleans some years, they tell me, the city pays for a fine box lunch… and they pay well too!”
“Pay?” Pavel asked. “They aren’t paying the voters to vote, are they?”
“Ya better believe it! You’re too young to remember when Mary Landrieu won her Senate seat in 1996, but the Republican she beat – Woody Jenkins – fought hard afterward, publicizing all the techniques that it took to beat him. Never claimed that she was involved, of course – candidates keep their hands clean in things like this, for plausible deniability and all – but as they say, ‘somebody’ sure did a lot for her! Either the party or the campaign… or some other outside support (heh heh), often paid anywhere from $10 to $50 a vote that year. Some folks collected as much as $700 that day to do their civic duty, time and time again! So I don’t know what the going rate is today down there, but with inflation… who knows?!”
Pockets picked up a stack of marked pollsheets and held them up as a visual aid, pointing at a successive line of imaginary volunteers as if ushering them all through the front door of a school bus. “Okay Bob, in here you’ll be Jim Smith of 100 Maple. Okay, Mike, you’re Bill Jones of 150 Maple. Okay, Cathy, you’re Jill Johnson of 155 Maple.” Between names, he’d joyfully take another gulp of his drink.
Pavel was unusually astounded, despite having become used to surprises, working at headquarters all summer. Actors in repertory companies don’t play that many parts in a day; Pockets had to be exaggerating about the busloads.
“Come on, Pockets; you can’t tell me that 45 people are all in the same bus, all in on the game, all aware of each other’s role. You’re saying that 45 individuals are each surrounded by 44 other witnesses to vote fraud, and that doesn’t scare them out of it? Any of ‘em could squeal!”
Pockets shook his head. “No, Paully, don’t you see? You pick people who don’t dare. People who need their patronage jobs… or whose dad or mom does… or their brothers or sisters or kids or in-laws do. Join the game, and you keep your job. Refuse or squeal, and you lose it… or your friend or relative loses theirs. You think anybody with a good city job ever wants to have to look for a job in the want ads? Or to hafta go out and interview with some private sector HR department?” Pockets shuddered just thinking about it.
“So, what you’re saying is,” Pavel paused, thinking of the right words, “that there’s actually safety in numbers. They all have to play along, and after the first precinct, they all know they’re all guilty of one more crime every hour, so they’re bound to be that much more careful, and to keep the secret that much closer!”
“Right-o, Paully. But why just once an hour? If the driver knows his town, and the route is planned out well, there’s no reason you couldn’t cover twenty precincts in a day. Maybe thirty. Think big, my boy!”
Pavel quickly did some math in his head. “We have worse traffic than New Orleans does. And most of our volunteers aren’t what you’d call ‘quick-moving.’ We’d have our work cut out for us, Pockets.”
“Well, then, rise to the occasion, son! It’s for the Party, after all! It’s not as hard as it looks. Ever wonder why we sometimes have two or even three different precincts vote in the same polling place? You can vote in three precincts a lot quicker if they’re all in the same building than you can if you have to drive between ‘em, from neighborhood to neighborhood. All you need is a lot of buses. And we sure have those!”
Now Pockets was getting excited… as if he might be ready to switch back to beer already. “Paully, you remember during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when the news stations all showed Louisiana politicians crying in New Orleans, as they’d cut to the picture of the flooded parking lots full of hundreds and hundreds of school buses, inaccessible, going unused? Now I realize why they were crying! That dope Mayor Nagin let a whole fleet get destroyed. I can just see Morial watching that same coverage on TV from home; he must’ve screamed bloody murder at the set to see such waste!”
“So… along with all their other problems, their machine must’ve been hobbled pretty seriously in the elections in the near term afterward,” Pavel reasoned. “No wonder that whiz kid Bobby Jindal won the governorship in 2007. Wonder if they’ve recovered at all yet.”
Pavel asked for a break so he could hit the refrigerator. He returned a moment later with a longneck for Pockets and a diet cola for himself.
Pavel was still finding this scheme hard to believe. How could 44 people unknown to any of the election judges all show up at once, saying they’re all from the same block? “Pockets, this doesn’t make sense. Everybody from the same addresses showing up at once in a big bunch? Won’t that raise suspicions?”
Pockets took a swig and explained. “In New Orleans, not only is it not suspicious at all, it’s the opposite! They expect groups of 40 or so to show up at once, with a driver at the door keeping track! Because the city provides buses… officially!”
“Officially? What do you mean?”
“The City of New Orleans sometimes mandates that the government offer free rides to the polls for anybody who needs one, so that there’s nothing suspicious about a city bus full of voters showing up at the polling place. Five, ten, twenty, or more buses could show up at each polling place all day long, and rather than raising an eyebrow, it would just make the Good-Government types brim over with pride that the government was ensuring high participation! Gotta love the Goo-Goos, eh, Paully? So easily conned… no matter whether in the sticky south or the beautiful midwest!”
“This sounds bigger than our techniques here, Pockets,” said Pavel, with as much righteous indignation as he could muster. “How come we’re the ones with a reputation for vote fraud if they do so much of it in Louisiana? How come nobody’s ever heard of their tricks?”
Pockets reached over and patted the boy on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, son… take it as a compliment. Democrats all over the country have been stealing elections for decades, but nobody knows about anybody else’s methods. We have the reputations as the kings of the ballot box, and that’s the way we want it to remain. Think about it, Paully; the more they know about, the more they might try to restrict it. Be glad the public thinks only our Illinois elections are corrupt; it means they give a free pass to our friends in the other 49 states! (or, the other 56, to use Barry’s count of 57, eh, Paully?)”
Pavel fell back in his chair. “How the heck do we know when to stop? How do we know which seats we’ve really won, and which ones we just stole, so we don’t go over the top and risk it all without need?”
“Hard to say, Paully,” said the old pol wistfully. “But I don’t mind. It kinda depends on how you look at it. If our guys could win honestly, they wouldn’t need us. As long as they need us, we’ve got a job, ya know? Well, at least I have. And you will too someday, if you keep working hard like this, son!”
Finally, Pavel asked his usual final question. “If you wanted it stopped… like, if the GOP was doing this and we needed to stop them. How the heck do you stop a program like that? Sneaking cash into people’s pockets for voting our way… driving them around from poll to poll to vote multiple times… this is incredible. Can’t the GOP do anything about it? Don’t they even try?”
“Well, sure, sometimes the loser doesn’t go away without a fight… Woody Jenkins did his best to challenge his election when he lost in 96. But don’t worry, Paully, the public has precious little interest in honest elections. They care more about a telephone poll in tomorrow’s paper – or whether the judging of some reality show might have been rigged – than they do about the only poll that really matters, the one on election day. They don’t mind what we’re doing; it’s too complicated to hold their interest.”
Pockets took a final swig to empty his beer. “Yup, it wouldn’t be hard. They’d just hafta mandate that everybody show a real state or federal ID – a real passport or driver’s license – to be allowed to vote. That’s really all it would take. Well, that and really prosecuting vote fraud, which they never do. A few hundred people nationwide, going to jail for a year or two, would force us to give it up for good. But there’s no risk of that, Paully. The Republicans are too wimpy to try. And as long as they don’t care about the integrity of the election, I say we may as well keep on doin’ what we’re doin’. Why fix what ain’t broken, right?”
And with that, Pockets sat back to the table where Pavel was working, and pulled up his own row of literature to collate.
Pavel looked over to see Pockets turn toward their wall map of the United States for just a moment… as Pockets faced Louisiana and gave just the slightest nod of respect in that direction, before getting down to the day’s work.
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 latest book, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volume Three,” was just published in November, 2023.
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