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 Forges Ahead
By John F. Di Leo
Pavel was staring at the wall of pens at his local office supply store, wondering what on earth he had gotten himself into.
Running errands for Pockets, the Deputy Committeeman of the 51st Ward organization, he had occasionally gotten coffee, picked up pizza, and delivered messages all around the neighborhood… on his bike in good weather, usually on foot in bad. But they had always been relatively normal requests.
Now he looked at Pockets’ chicken scratchings on the note in his hand, and was genuinely perplexed. “Ballpoints: One black pen, one dark blue thick point, one lighter blue thin point, one red… Fine point markers: one black, one blue… and two boxes of pencils – a number 2 and a number 1.”
When he asked why, all Pockets would say was that some dummy left the special pen box under an open window the last time it rained, so they needed to replace them all. And he had a system. A “special pen box”? This was going to be interesting.
When he got back to headquarters, Pavel felt a need to explain every aspect of the purchase. “Some of the pens, singly, were more expensive than buying in bulk… so I got just one each of these two, but these fine point markers were a better deal as a set of five, and these ballpoints were actually cheaper in these ten-packs…”
Pockets smiled. “Thanks, Paully. Knew ya’d do great. This is what we need. A variety, but nothing too odd; all the sort of pen that normal people have at home. Perfect!”
“So…” Pavel asked, “are you going to tell me what this was all about, or just keep me wondering?”
Pockets looked around to make sure headquarters was empty – there had been some rumors of leaked secrets lately, so he wanted to be certain he and Pavel were alone – and settled in to give him a lesson. “Ya wanna get us a coupla drinks, Paully?”
Pavel was already on it. Pavel Syerov, Jr. (Paul to his friends) had been helping out at the local party HQ ever since summer vacation, and had become adept at picking up on Pockets’ signals, especially when the old man was ready for another “grenade” – a longneck bottle of beer – or a snack – a bag full of honey wheat braid pretzels. Pavel headed to the refrigerator pronto, and brought back a beer for Pockets and a diet cola for himself.
“So here’s the thing, Paully,” began Pockets, as he cracked open his bottle of sustenance, “the election’s coming soon, and one of our jobs is to lock in whatever we can in advance.”
“You mean absentee ballots, Pockets?”
“Got it in one, my boy!” Pockets was proud of his young student; the boy was quick on the uptake. “Both parties always push for as many absentee ballots from their dependable voters – the ‘Hard Ds’ for us, the ‘Hard Rs’ for them – as we can get. Used to be, the Republicans were better at it, but things have changed.”
“People out of town are more likely to be Republican, Pockets? Why?”
“Well, it’s a mixed bag. Your military absentees and businessmen on business trips tend to be Republicans, and your singles on vacation and old folks scheduled for surgery tend to be Democrats… at least that’s how it always used to be.”
“So what’s changed?” the boy pressed on.
Pockets took a good swig of beer, and began. “Well, there are people who take an avid interest in the election, and they ask for applications. We help them get the applications filed, and we can count on them voting right because they’re our folks; they came to us, after all, not the other guys.”
“Makes sense…”
“But then there are also some who don’t ask for applications, even though they’ll be out of town. They’re the ones we need to really concentrate on.”
“But wait, Pockets…” Pavel asked. “if they don’t order an absentee ballot, and we can’t talk them into it, it’s over, right?”
“No, Paully, that’s just when we change tactics, that’s all!” Pockets sat back and smiled. This was his specialty. “Do you remember a questionnaire you circulated during one of our canvasses last summer?” Pavel nodded yes. “You were wondering why we were asking things like whether they’d be in town on election day, whether they expected to vote or not, and so forth?” Again Pavel nodded in the affirmative.
“Once we know they’ll be out of town, the question isn’t whether they’ll be voting absentee or not, it’s just whether they’ll be doing it on their own, or if we’ll be doing it for them!”
Pavel’s eyes went wide. “So, if they don’t file a request, we request one for them?”
“Yes indeed. The methods vary from state to state, of course, but yes, we can make sure they vote absentee, whether they want to or not.” The old man chuckled and reached for a pretzel.
“One method is to file the applications with somebody we have working for the board of elections, so they’ll deliver the ballots directly to our volunteers. Our volunteers drive to their homes, and supervise the voting process. We help them fill them in correctly, in case they have trouble knowing what to do.”
Pavel interrupted here. “But we’re not allowed near an actual ballot if there isn’t a Republican pollworker there too, right? Doesn’t there have to be one of each?”
“You know that, Paully, and I know that… but the voters usually don’t know that. And what they don’t know, won’t hurt them. Our folks help them vote the right way, collect the ballot, and move on to the next house on their route. Sometimes they aren’t sure, so our people smile and fill it in for them, though I’ve always thought that’s pushing our luck a bit. The voter should have the pleasure of filling it in himself, ya know?”
The old ward heeler’s voice dropped here, and Pavel leaned in. “And sometimes, if a grand jury comes calling – Heaven forbid! – you don’t want the voter to be able to say he never even held the ballot in his own hand. You want the voter to be able to say, honestly, that he filled in the ballot himself.”
Pavel had read an article about just such a situation, in which a couple of members of Alderman Bernie Stone’s 50th Ward organization had been sentenced in 2010 for committing that very crime back in 2007. These two “volunteers” (one a patronage job holder at Streets and Sanitation) were convicted of exactly what Pockets was talking about. Apparently, saving the voters a little trouble really isn’t the best way to go about it, if they’re right there in the room to see you do it.
While the prosecutors allowed the two crooks to plead down from felonies to misdemeanors, Judge Marcus Salone still gave them about a year in jail, saying at the time “the reality is that they attempted to steal democracy.”
“Yes,” said Pavel, “I see how it might be better for our case if we made sure the voters themselves filled it in.”
Pockets took another swig of his beer, and moved on to the next method. “My preferred method, frankly, doesn’t involve witnesses. See, when ya know somebody’s gonna be outta town at election time, ya can put him on a list. Ya watch to see if he submits an application on his own. If he doesn’t, great! Then ya submit one on his behalf, and your folks inside the Board of Elections just deliver the ballots to you.”
“Again,” interjected Pavel, “you need to have somebody on the inside, huh?”
“Oh, yeah, Paully, that’s imperative. Ya can still do stuff from outside if ya need to, but it’s easiest if ya got somebody at city hall. That’s why ya never wanna lose power, once you have it.”
“Like the old saying, ‘I’ve been Rich, and I’ve been Poor, and Rich is better,’ right, Pockets? ‘I’ve been In, and I’ve been Out, and In is better!’”
Pockets let out a snort – “Good one, Paully!” – and polished off the last of his beer. “Gimme another grenade, wouldja?”
Pavel did his refrigerator run, and sat back down, handing Pockets his longneck.
“So when we know the folks won’t be applying, and won’t be in town, for certain…” here, Pockets raised his beer in a toast, “that’s when we go to work!”
“So we file their applications, we get their ballots, and we cast their votes, all on their behalf, without them ever even knowing it?”
“Exactly. The best way to avoid getting in trouble is if nobody knows and there are no witnesses,” Pockets explained with pride. “They didn’t apply, so they’re not surprised when they don’t get ballots in the mail… and they didn’t plan to vote, so they never check to see if they were recorded as voting. And if they ever do see a report that says they did vote, they’ll just assume it was a mistake. See? Easy!”
“So what are the pens for?”
“There’s the key to it all! People who get caught, and go to jail, slip up on such simple stuff. They’ll have one guy do fifty applications in the same handwriting, with the same pen. Dumb! You get ten people around a table, and use different pens. Different pens, different handwriting, and it’s a lot harder to catch.”
“You can still be caught, though, right Pockets? I mean, that’s a pretty serious crime, isn’t it?”
Pockets chuckled. “Nah, nobody ever prosecutes it. Too hard to catch. We don’t have to worry. That’s what we’re here for, Paully; gotta do our job!”
Pavel knew better, but he didn’t think he should speak up just now. To tell Pockets about the article he’d read that morning on the web just might give Pockets the idea that the old man wasn’t this student’s only source for information.
It hadn’t made national news – such stories never do… wonder why? – but there was quite a case brewing in Troy, New York. Nine Democrat officials in Rensselaer County had been under consideration by a grand jury, and on January 28, 2011, the first two – Councilman Michael LoPorto and Elections Commissioner Edward McDonough – pled not guilty to a combined 116 counts of felony vote fraud for forging absentee ballots in a local race in 2009.
Wow. Maybe these sorts of things are indeed being prosecuted. And high time, too, Pavel thought to himself.
Time to ask if this was one of the big ones in the toolkit, or just a minor extra. “Does this absentee ballot technique make a big difference, Pockets?” he asked, as he refilled the bowl of honey wheat pretzel braids, and pushed it over toward his “mentor.”
“Depends on where you are, like everything else,” he answered, taking a pretzel and nodding. Using the pretzel as a pointer, as he often did, he pointed at an imaginary chalkboard in the air and checked off a few examples.
“One: Your dead people, and your fake ACORN registrations, for example. If you’ve got a full pack of pollworkers in the polling place (we call them election judges, here in Chicago), they do this on election day, but if ya don’t, we can do it in advance, from the office, by absentee.”
“Two: Your snowbirds – the folks who have an apartment in New York and a condo in Florida, for example. They won’t be in New York on election day; so we vote them by absentee. Two people, four votes. Almost won Florida in 2000 for Al Gore that way…”
“Three: Your kids who’ve moved away… we never cull them from the list; as long as their folks are on the pollsheet, the kids stay there too. It’s dangerous to vote those names on election day, because the parents might notice when they show up at the polls; so we vote ‘em by absentee.”
“Four: Your illegals, and other completely uninvolved non-voters who are just on the rolls because they got a driver’s license. Those people never actually show up, so the names are just sitting there on the pollsheet, like plums, ready to be plucked as soon as they’re ripe, ya know?”
Pockets sat back down and crunched on the pretzel. “Those are the main ones,” he sputtered through a spray of crumbs. “Oops! Sorry, Paully,” he chuckled as he wiped his mouth and had another swig of beer.
Pavel knew there were even more such abuses of absentee ballots – he remembered a case he’d read about in East Chicago, Indiana, for example, in which the mayor’s campaign workers had paid immigrants in cash for their absentee ballots, had pressured the poor and sick into voting their way in their presence, had given illegal instructions to voters, telling them that they’d need to fill out their ballots under the supervision of the mayor’s office… and the incumbent had won his squeaker of a reelection effort in 2003, largely thanks to these very “election enhancers.” In that case, Judge Steven King said it was “a textbook example of the chicanery that can attend the absentee vote cast by mail.”
And then there was the Florida case of Daytona Beach City Commissioner Derrick Henry, whose office was raided in September, 2010, turning up a computer chock full of illegal absentee ballot requests. Kudos to Volusia County Election Supervisor Ann McFall, who noticed that some ninety absentee ballot requests had all come from the same two email addresses.
Oh yes, there’s one thing Pockets was right about: it’s widespread. Absentee vote fraud has become a huge technique of the Democratic Party, all across the country. Pavel was beginning to recognize his body’s message that he’d had about all he could take, today… he was getting that familiar feeling in his gut, that he’d need a couple of antacids for the walk home.
He thanked Pockets for the chat, put on his coat, and headed home, wondering yet again – as he had so many times over these past months at headquarters – when the Republican Party was going to have the sense to recognize the danger that rampant vote fraud poses to its very existence. When would our Republican legislators – in Springfield, in Washington, heck, everywhere! – finally have the sense to clamp down and force a vote on tightening up these insanely loose voting systems?
Copyright 2010-2024 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.
As an actor performing in Chicagoland theatre, John will be featured as “Old Joe” Boyd in the musical comedy “Damn Yankees” at St. Stephen Protomartyr in Des Plaines, IL, only on Fridays, March 1 and 8, 2024.
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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