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 Bratwurst
By John F. Di Leo
“Hello, Pockets!” shouted an exuberant Pavel Syerov Jr. (Paul to his friends), as he bounded into 51st ward headquarters after school. “Got anything new today, or same as usual?”
Pockets, the longtime deputy committeeman and day-to-day office manager, chuckled at his favorite volunteer’s lively arrival. “Wish we had some precincts to walk, to use up some of that energy, son. But no, just a mailing to collate. Pull up a seat, Paully, and gimme a hand, eh?”
Pavel stopped at the refrigerator and brought back a diet cola for himself and a beer for the old man, and took his spot on the opposite side of the collating table, then sat down to work on the week’s mailing.
“So how’s it going with your new girlfriend, Paully? Taking her out again this weekend? Another show?”
“Fraid not, Pockets. She’s going up to Wisconsin with her folks this weekend. Guess I may as well hang out here as long as you have something for me to do.”
“Wisconsin, eh?” Pockets took a long draw off his beer. “Big election in Wisconsin today. Late primary. Crazy-late. Total incumbency-protection-plan late. Have we ever talked about Wisconsin?”
“Not specifically, Pockets.” Pavel could see a lesson ahead, so he opened up a bag of honey wheat braid pretzels and restocked Pockets’ snack bowl. “I wouldn’t think there was much to tell about Wisconsin. Fighting Bob LaFollette, all those good government rules – campaign finance limits, old Senator Proxmire’s famous dirt-cheap campaigns – squeaky clean, right?”
At this, Pockets nearly fell off his seat laughing. “Dunno where ya got your information, son, but it’s dated! The LaFollettes were a century ago, and Proxmire over a generation ago. Wisconsin’s wide open for us, Paully, wide open.”
Pavel opened up the notebook he kept in his head, and asked the old pro to tell him all about it.
“Well, it all starts with registration. In Wisconsin, they want to make it easy for everyone to vote, so they allow onsite registration. There’s no deadline; you can just show up at the polls ready to vote, not on the list, give ‘em your name and address, and they sign you up right there and then, and hand you a ballot!”
“How does that help us, Pockets?” asked the boy. “I’m sure both Republicans and Democrats alike use this feature, right?”
“Not really, son. Republicans tend to be more organized than our folks; they register to vote well in advance of the deadline. We have a lot more Democrat voters who forget about it until the last minute, so it’s really just in there for our side.”
“Okay, so that’s still not anything sneaky, just us doing what the law was set out to do – enabling everybody to vote who’s entitled. I suppose they show a driver’s license, or a utility bill, or something like that, to prove who they are and where they live, right?”
Pockets smiled and had another swig of beer. “Nope! They don’t hafta show anything at all in Wisconsin. All they really need is a friend or neighbor who lives in the same city to vouch for them. So for example, what we’ve done in the past is, we’ll get some pros sent in from Washington or New York to help us out on an election, and they walk in with our regulars on election day. The regulars say ‘yup, he’s my roommate’ or ‘yup, he lives across the hall from me,’ and the judges hafta let ‘em vote! What a system, huh?”
“Wow.” Pavel was surprised. He wasn’t lying, he really had assumed that Wisconsin was a clean state. So he continued, “But those must be provisional ballots, right, Pockets? They set them aside in an envelope, check the address the next day, and don’t count them until the address is verified, right?”
Pockets almost choked on his pretzel. “Set ‘em aside? Are you nuts? That wouldn’t do at all, Paully!” He chugged his beer and explained. “They mail out verification cards the next day, automatically, from what I hear. So they start getting the ‘return to sender’ responses within a few days. You realize how many perfectly good votes we’d lose if we waited for those responses? No, we count every vote on election day, mix ‘em all together. It’s the only way.”
“But then, once the returns come back, you can’t do anything about it; the bad ballots are irretrievable! Making the whole voter verification process a waste of time! What’s the point of having it at all?”
Pockets just smiled. Pavel asked if he had heard of any statistics on how many bad registrations there were, and Pockets nodded.
“Now, I haven’t worked up there myself, Paully, you understand… but I’ve heard some pretty good numbers. In 2004, 20% of the voting age population of Milwaukee – over 80,000 – used same-day registration. You think that made a difference? You bet it did! We beat Bush in Wisconsin in 2004 by only 11,000-somethin’ votes. Those same-day registrations really worked out for us!”
“But if they’re valid, we didn’t pull anything, Pockets, right?”
“If they’re valid? Whattaya been doing, napping over there, Paully? The following year, in 2005, Milwaukee had to jettison about 120,000 names from their lists – 120,000 names that had been on the list in 2004. Including a heck of lot of those same day registrations from November. Ya think 120,000 people all moved away in a coupla months’ time? No, a heck of a lot of those were our kind of voters. Ya know, Paully, our favorites: the fictional kind.”
“How do they do it, Pockets? Is it brazen, or do they have some kind of technique?”
Pockets munched on a pretzel and shrugged his shoulders. “From what I hear, they use a little bit of all the usual techniques… bringing up busloads of volunteers from Chicago or elsewhere, giving ‘em each a valid name on the voting rolls, ya know, the New Orleans method. Bringing in campaign workers to a coupla precincts, claiming they live there, and having a colleague vouch for them… having people with two houses – like a regular home and a hunting cabin up north – cast votes at both, the same day… getting college students to vote both at home with their folks and away on campus. You know.”
Pockets chuckled and signaled for another longneck. “Here’s a fun one, Paully… coupla years ago a fella ran for a state senate seat in Madison, and voted in both Illinois and Wisconsin the same day! The candidate himself! You won’t catch any of our boys doin’ anything that dumb. He owned property in both states, so he figured, why not?! The Republicans caught him at it while doing normal opposition research for the fall campaign! Isn’t that a beauty?”
Pavel brought him a fresh beer, and asked “With all that going on in Wisconsin, do the Republicans do anything to fight back?”
“Oh yeah, ‘fraid so. They’ve tried.” Pockets leaned back and took a swig. “Three times in the last decade, the Republican majority in Madison passed election reform bills. Both houses, three times… mandating that a real ID – a driver’s license, passport, state-issued picture ID, ya know, a good one that’s hard to copy – would hafta be shown to vote. Not just when the judges suspect something, but every time, every voter, every minute! Woulda killed us up there…”
Pavel perked up. “The Republicans passed it three times? So why didn’t the vote fraud stop?”
“Because we own the governor’s mansion in Wisconsin, Paully! Luckily, Jim Doyle has been governor up there for the past eight years. He knows which side of his bread is buttered. There’s no greater friend of the stuffed ballot box than ol’ Jim Doyle. He took care of us when he was attorney general, and he’s taken care of us for eight years as governor.” The old man sighed, and completed his thought. “Yup, it’s been a good run.”
“You sound like it’s ending… what happened?”
“Doyle isn’t running again. Musta seen the writing on the wall. He’s stepping down this year. Tom Barrett is running for governor this time. Mayor of Milwaukee, used to be a congressman. It’s not looking good.”
“Why not?”
“Because that young hotshot Scott Walker is running for the Republicans. Sharp guy, real successful as Milwaukee County Executive ever since the Ament recall. Looks like potential landslide material, darn it.”
“What’s a county executive, Pockets?”
“It’s their boss of the county. Like what we call the President of the Cook County Board. So he’s like, their Todd Stroger (only honest, smart, and electable, unlike our Todd!).”
“Milwaukee County elected a conservative Republican? Wow! Must have been a fluke though, right?”
“Nope, you’d think so, but the people love him; he was reelected with a healthy margin, he’s popular, and now it looks like he’ll probably be the next governor of Wisconsin, assuming he wins today’s primary.”
“Wow.” Pavel was genuinely impressed. “A conservative county exec in Milwaukee. If that can happen, Roger Keats can win here in Cook!”
Pockets nearly spilled his beer. “Ya think? Wait…. No, no, we can’t let that happen. You’re right, it’s possible, but we have to make sure we pull out all the stops so we beat him. Can’t let a Republican win in Cook County. You realize how many of us would have to go out and get real jobs? Perish the thought!”
Pavel tried to bring back the conversation to where he wanted it. “So back to Wisconsin, Pockets… you say the Republicans passed a bill that would have mandated that every voter show a valid state or federal ID?”
“Yeah, that’s right, son. Three times they passed it. That state rep from Greendale, Jeff Stone. He’s the ranking Republican on their campaigns and elections committee in Madison, and he’s made it something of a quest… gives interviews, introduces it every year, talks about it. A real champion of honest elections, darn it (and from such a nice working-class community, too… who’d have thought it?)! Anyway, the Republicans passed their real ID bill three times, and all three times, Governor Jim Doyle took care of us. He vetoed it every time, saying it was unconstitutional.”
“Was it?”
Pockets chuckled. “What do we care? Our side hasn’t read the Constitution in a hundred years!” Pockets realized he might have had too much beer, and got serious fast. “Anyway,” he continued, “Doyle vetoed it on the grounds that it was unconstitutional, and then another state passed the same bill and the Supreme Court upheld it! So we’ve probably lost that argument against it, darn it. So anyway, that’s why we’re worried about Wisconsin… if the GOP gets both the assembly and the governor’s mansion back this year – as is perfectly possible – they’re almost sure to pass it again.”
“And now that they know it passes Constitutional muster,” Pavel continued, “there’s nothing standing in the way of them passing and signing it. Right?” Pockets could only nod in the affirmative. “So if the Republicans win big in Wisconsin this year, it could be the end for us of tens of thousands of nice ‘extra’ votes from Wisconsin.”
“Yes indeed, Paully, yes indeed. So we’re a little worried. The margin of fraud was undoubtedly greater than the margin of victory in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections in Wisconsin. Ya remember how narrow those presidential elections were, especially 2000? Well, imagine if we didn’t have Wisconsin on our side, and the GOP got Wisconsin’s electoral votes instead. Not so close, then. This could really hurt us. I hope our folks in Wisconsin are working real hard this November. It’s totally ‘use it or lose it’ time in Wisconsin this year, Paully – if we don’t make the most of our tools this time, we may lose them entirely.”
Pavel opened up another can of pop and pondered the day’s lesson. So even Wisconsin, squeaky clean Wisconsin, has undependable elections, with Democrats jealously protecting their fraud-enabling techniques. “Well, thanks for telling me about all our tools in Wisconsin, anyway, Pockets. Amazing stuff. Good to know.”
Pockets put his hat on and stood up. “Oh, I haven’t told ya the half of it. We’ve got some friends in Wisconsin with techniques that’ll top everything we’ve got up there now – concerts, tickets, food, smokes – but not today, son, I’m a little tired. Gonna go home now. We’ll continue this later.”
And with that, the old ballot-stuffer shuffled out of headquarters, leaving the ward in the dependable hands of its youngest volunteer until closing time.
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. While the characters in the book are totally fictional, unfortunately, the types of often-rampant vote fraud the characters discuss are all too real. 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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