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 Drives Away
By John F. Di Leo
The silence at party headquarters was suddenly broken, as Pockets screamed “What are they thinking???” at his computer, out of the blue.
Pockets, the deputy committeeman in charge of the ward office, was seated at his desk, surfing the internet, sipping his beer as usual, while his summer helper, Pavel Syerov, Jr. (Paul to his friends) was collating literature for the other “volunteers” to deliver, door-to-door (calling these patronage slugs “volunteers” always made him chuckle). Pockets’ outburst made the high-school student lose his place.
“We had an understanding!” grumbled Pockets into his keyboard. “They shoulda known better. The bums. Stupid tech geeks; they dunno the trouble they’re causing…”
Pavel was lost, so he asked to be filled in. “Didja see this article in AP yesterday? “More Immigrants Getting Licenses!” Pockets snorted and took a last swig of his beer. “Yahoo’s got it up on their main page now, for all to see!”
Pavel didn’t yet see what the big deal was, so Pockets motioned for the boy to bring him another longneck, and the lesson began.
“You said you were gonna be getting your driver’s license soon, right, Paully?” asked the old pol.
“Yeah, Pockets, just went in for my test yesterday! Here it is!” Pavel took his shiny new license out of his wallet and handed it to Pockets. Pockets took one look and sighed.
“See, they’ve been making it tougher and tougher in state after state, Paully.” Pockets pointed to the license, and flicked it back and forth so it would catch the light from several directions. “They show your driver’s license number, and your full name, and your address. Also a picture and several dates. Also your height and weight, and two pictures, a big and a little. And a coupla holograms to frustrate counterfeiters. That’s an Illinois license.”
“Aren’t they all like that?” The seventeen-year-old son of immigrants had seen his parents’ old passport, but didn’t have any experience with other forms of identification.
“Nope, every state does it differently. Some states include your Social Security number, some don’t… some have a detailed description, some have none. Some mention whether or not you’re a citizen… most of ’em ’ll let you decide whether you use your middle name or middle initial or nickname… it’s all over the map, son.” He pointed to the photos before returning the boy’s new driver’s license. “See, we have two images of the same picture in Illinois… and some states just have one. Heh… the muslims are trying to get the courts to let’em take pictures of their women while they’re completely covered, head to toe, in their burkas, which is just like not having a picture at all! Crazy, huh?”
“Wow. Well, that must be one of the few things both parties agree to oppose, right, Pockets?”
“Nosiree, son. We know it’s idiotic, of course, but we generally support the burka folks on principal. The important thing is to render the driver’s license as ineffective as possible. The less information, the better for us.”
“Why would that be, Pockets? Don’t we all benefit by having safe drivers on the roads, and making sure that all drivers have insurance? What does the driver’s license have to do with our job for the party?”
Pocket’s smiled and took a long chug from his beer. “I remember how I felt when I got my first license, and my first car, Paully. Almost fifty years ago now; it was a used Thunderbird… seven or eight years old… all I could think about was getting my license for months.”
Pockets continued, “but your driver’s license is good for lots of other things, Paully. It’s your main identification… if you use a credit card or write a check, your driver’s license proves who you are. If you get a ticket or get arrested, the driver’s license makes sure that the right person gets the black mark on his record. It can help when you apply for a job…”
“But I thought you used your Social Security card on a job application?” the boy broke in.
“Yeah, but have you ever looked at your Social Security card? It’s just a piece of hard paper with a name and a number printed on it. No picture, no hologram, no lamination… easily lost, easily forged, easily stolen. No good as an ID. While the feds have been constantly improving on the quality of the passport… and a lot of states have improved on the quality of their driver’s licenses… the Social Security card has gone basically unchanged. It’s not what ya call ‘secure,’ ya know? So employers ask for the Social Security number, but it’s the driver’s license that they usually use as proof of ID for their HR records. Gimme another grenade, wouldja, son?”
Pavel headed back to the refrigerator for another beer as Pockets continued.
“So we’ve got this dichotomy here… when an employer wants to satisfy the IRS and Dept of Labor and all those other federal regulations – creating the W-2 and all that stuff – he relies on a state-issued ID, because everybody knows they’re more reliable, they have more info on them, and so forth. And some states help by adding other info, like the phone number or the Social Security number, to optimize their usefulness for credit checks, job applications, and stuff like that.”
Pavel handed him his longneck and said, “so in a way, even more so than how the driver’s license is a teenager’s ticket to adulthood, it’s also every adult’s ticket to being part of America, part of the American experience, as well. It’s your identity, it’s how you can do everything you do. What you’re saying is, the states that have tried to make it better – more secure, more informative – are just stepping in because the federal government isn’t meeting the need by improving the free Social Security card, or making the passport more affordable.”
“Exactly, Paully. It’s grown beyond its original purpose; it enables you to get a car, to get a house, to get a job. And the states think they’re just helping out.”
“Well, why doesn’t the federal government do a better job? Why don’t they improve the Social Security card themselves, or make the passport more widely used, so we don’t depend on all these state cards?”
“Ya really wanna know, Paully? Every time anybody proposes a really effective, national ID card, or in fact, even when they passed some watered-down federal standards for state IDs in 2005, we can always count on a coupla loopy libertarians to oppose it on the idea that it reminds them of Nazi Germany. I remember Bob Barr slamming it all the time, saying things like how it ‘threatens people’s privacy and places an undue burden on the states.’ What a doofus. Better IDs would protect the public from identity theft, restrict illegal immigration, and stop vote fraud. It’d really cripple our election season programs.”
Pockets raised his longneck in a toast, waiting for Pavel to do the same with his can of diet cola. “To the Libertarians, our greatest friends on the right, always standing firm for absolute perfection and giving us the victory as a result!” Pockets pseudo-seriously put his hand on his heart… and then drained the bottle in one long gulp. As an aside, he muttered “remind to tell you about how we won Jim Talent’s senate seat away sometime, Paully.”
“Back to illegal immigration and vote fraud, Pockets” said Pavel. “Illegal immigrants don’t check in at the border; they sneak by, or under a fence or through a tunnel or hidden in a truck, or sail in on a boat, right? So what does it matter what the ID looks like if they’re going by routes where nobody checks them?”
“It’s when they do something else that it matters, son,” explained Pockets. “When they apply for a job, or for credit cards, or for public housing, or a checking account, or to enroll their kids in the local government schools. A driver’s license makes you look legitimate. They could easily state the Social Security number on the card, and report citizenship right there, if they wanted to. But our friends on the Professionally Offended committees – your Luis Guttierez and Jesse Jackson types, ya know – they count on it being hard to check, so that when you do check, it’s noticeable, and you can claim being offended by being singled out. That scares people out of checking in case the person’s really a citizen. So employers hire illegals, and illegals put their kids in school, and get public housing and welfare and everything, and it builds our power base. Not bad, huh?”
Pavel considered staying with immigration awhile, but he tabled it for a later talk and returned to the main issue at hand. “So what made you cry out when you saw this article, Pockets? Anything to do with vote fraud?”
Pockets scowled. “We prefer to call it election enhancement nowadays, son. And yes, that’s why I was mad. The article didn’t actually mention elections at all, but it’s all in there for anybody who knows how to read it. It came too close to the line. See, the article was released by the AP, and Yahoo put it on their homepage, so ya gotta figure a ton of people read it.”
“Sure,” Pavel agreed. “Huge exposure, being on that browser in the news section. Tens of thousands had to see it. Hundreds of thousands, maybe.”
Pockets began to read from the AP article by Tim Korte and Manuel Valdes. “Three states – Washington, New Mexico and Utah – allow illegal immigrants to get licenses because their laws do not require proof of citizenship or legal residency. An Associated Press analysis found that those states have seen a surge in immigrants seeking IDs in recent months, a trend experts attribute to crackdowns on illegal immigration in Arizona and elsewhere.”
Pockets snorted in disgust. “Ya think people can’t put two and two together? It’s an election year… we’re in the papers pushing voter registration programs all over the country. And here they go letting the public know how easy it is. We’ve spent ten years pushing the fiction that the GOP tried to steal the 2000 presidential election. It’s ridiculous, but we’ve succeeded; half the country really believes it… we can jeopardize that wonderful success by publicizing how easy we’ve made it for our side – our demographics, our interest groups – to enhance our numbers!”
Pavel felt like something big was coming, so he opened up a bag of honey wheat braid pretzels – Pockets’ favorite – that he’d been hiding in case of an opportunity like this. He pushed the bag across the table to the old man, and asked him to clarify.
“In 1993, we finally passed the Motor Voter Act, requiring that almost all states (a few had their own constitutional justifications to be exempted) hafta allow people to be registered to vote, if they want to be, while they’re buying or renewing their driver’s licenses. Most folks figure that their states are really rigorous about driver’s licenses – highway safety and all, ya know – so most people went along with it. It’s goo-goo – totally a ‘good government’ sham – but hey, as long as it works, that’s that, eh?”
“Now I get it!” shouted Pavel. “On the one hand, we’ve made it easy to register to vote at driver’s license time, with everybody assuming that getting a driver’s license was rigorous… but on the other hand, this article admits to the careful reader that the driver’s license process isn’t rigorous – that people can get them who aren’t even citizens and therefore aren’t allowed to vote! So you’re mad at AP and Yahoo for writing the article and letting the cat out of the bag! Right, Pockets?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much it, Paully” said Pockets between pretzels. “The law really should mandate a certified birth certificate or naturalization papers, and a copy of your mortgage or your lease, to prove both citizenship and residence, or just not accept a registration. That’d give us honest elections, and our side’d never win a majority again! But we’ve managed to dumb down the process so much over they years, we let ya register with anything, anything at all! You wouldn’t believe how many people get registered with a utility bill, a birthday card; lots of registrars’ll take anything that looks like the Post Office delivered it to them, without a second thought!“
Pavel took a pretzel too, and said “You could just send a mailing of credit card applications or subscription applications to dozens of nonexistent names at real addresses that a party member lives at, to create voters out of whole cloth, for the judges to convert into ballots on election night, couldn’t you?” Pockets didn’t say a word.
Pockets returned to the matter at hand. “So here we are, depending on driver’s licenses for automatic registrations, and these bums in the AP go and write a big story about it. And then Yahoo goes and blasts it all over the internet. It’s like negotiating a little deal in the corner of the convention, and somebody hooking up a microphone and blasting it through the convention hall speakers for all to hear! It’s a violation of our deal with the journalistic profession, Paully, that’s what it is.”
Pavel looked back at his own shiny new driver’s license, and asked “But they’d still get found out, wouldn’t they, Pockets? When they show up to vote, I mean? You can’t have the same guy walk into the polling place fifty times all day… you’d need that New Orleans method with the busloads of patronage workers to take advantage of all those false registrations.”
Pockets just stared at him. “They vote absentee, Paully. You send in the stack of applications, the county sends them out, and you fill in the ballots and send them in. How do you think we get such a great vote turnout, election after election? You think the average welfare family with a non-working mom and a no-show dad and kids who only go to school to score drug deals – you think they show up to vote in 80 to 90 percent rates, every time? Come on son. We cast a lot of those votes. The absentee ballot has become our greatest friend. Especially in states that have such low standards they give driver’s licenses to illegals, and allow motor-voter to automatically register them to vote. Especially in states that allow absentee voting for such registrations. I’ll tell ya, son, it’s getting to the point where they don’t need us anymore, they’ve made it so easy to cheat.”
“You mean, to enhance the election, right, Pockets?”
“Heh heh… Yes indeed, Paully. Utah, Washington, and New Mexico all allow automatic voter registration at the time of getting a driver’s license… and they give driver’s licenses to illegals… and they all allow absentee ballots. Some states – like Colorado, Oregon, and Hawaii – even have all mail-in elections, in which they don’t have polling places at all! Every vote – every vote, every single one! – is an absentee ballot, without a single human election judge, honest or not, sitting at a table to double-check the voter. We’re pretty much at the point where we could hold – and win – an entire election with nothing but one party hack, a computer, and a number two pencil. Crazy, huh? Heck, in 2004, a study reported that over 58,000 illegals had been given driver’s licenses in Utah alone. 58,000 in a practically empty state! The system works… better than ever!”
Pockets cracked open his fourth beer in half an hour, and handed his young assistant another soda, then raised his own in a toast. “To driver’s licenses, Paully! And to the absentee ballot!”
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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