For the next 51 days, we’ll be in the midst of Silly Season, the biennial statewide election campaign. You’ll see and hear things you don’t see and hear the rest of the time.
Silly as it may seem at times, the election is sacred to our democracy. If we have a civic equivalent to attending worship, it is voting. At least partly because we vote, we are coming, gradually, to live up to the ideals in our founding documents.
It may have been Jean Shepherd who dubbed campaigns the “Silly Season.” If it wasn’t Shepherd, the longtime radio talker (best known for writing “Toy Story” in 1983), it should have been. It is his kind of line, his kind of idea. And it seems accurate much of the time. Fairly early in Silly Season, we have already seen and heard this.
Jared Golden, running for the U.S. House of Representatives, posed as a lobster boat sternman and made a pitch to throw the incumbent overboard. Judging from how he wears his Grundens and how he threw a handful of seaweed overboard, I’d say he’s been on a lobster boat about one time more than I have. (I’ve never been on a lobster boat.) He seems a bit uncertain about reading his lines as a faux lobsterman, too, but as he gets accustomed to making TV commercials he may get smoother.
And you’ll see Bruce Poliquin, the incumbent, in commercials sneering at the tattoo Golden wears (on his right arm) to honor his Marine Corps service and units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Poliquin never mentions that he didn’t serve in the military, let alone volunteer after 9/11. In fact, in the ads I’ve seen, he never mentions anything. I haven’t heard Poliquin’s voice on an ad. It’s just still photos and someone else’s voice. ‘Course, his voice is a bit whiny, so he may choose to put it on air as little as possible.
These commercials are part of the fun of the campaign for politics junkies. Even though we see a sacred aura around elections, there isn’t much to keep nefarious people from turning Silly Season into something more sinister, to cook the election books, as it were.
Maybe it was always thus. You wouldn’t have to sit long around a cracker barrel in Kansas City to hear about the Democratic primary in 1934. The primary played out to the sound of gunfire. Four people died, members of the “wrong” political faction.
Someone around that cracker barrel would trot out the number of “voters” whose names were found by the FBI and The Kansas City Star on the rolls of folks buried in city cemeteries. A reporter for The Star, holding the voter list, is said to have walked down the rows of headstones in one cemetery, predicting the name on the next headstone just by looking at the voting list. The “factions” hadn’t even bothered to scramble the names on the cemetery rolls.
After that, the word “faction” came to mean “old-line Democratic clubs” in the pages of The Star. We still used the term when I was a reporter for The Star in 1966-69.
By the way, in that primary in 1934, a judge of the Jackson County Court — in Missouri, a county court, like a board of select people in Maine, is an administrative body — won the nomination as the Democrats’ candidate for the U.S. Senate. The “factions” backed Harry S. Truman, even though the boss, Tom Pendergast, didn’t like the idea.
Today, we face attempts to disenfranchise as many people as possible. It’s not a new game. For 80 years, Democrats rigged the process, especially in the South, to keep black folks from voting. Today, Republicans cry “fraud,” saying that thousands vote illegally.
The purported illegalities take several forms. People voting in two precincts. Noncitizens voting. Convicted felons voting where it is banned. (Only Maine and Vermont let felons vote while in prison. Fourteen states let them vote after serving their time, 21 let them vote if they sit out a given amount of time after prison and 13 ban them from voting indefinitely.) Or, as in Kansas City 84 years ago, dead people voting.
The Brennan Center, a nonpartisan, though left-leaning institute at the law school of New York University, has investigated hundreds of claims of voting fraud. In three of the states it has studied, it found this evidence of fraudulent voting:
In Missouri, the Brennan Center said investigators found six substantiated cases of ineligible votes, all cases of double voting. That’s six in 2.3 million votes cast. In New Jersey, it reports an investigation of claims of dead people voting and of people voting in two states in the 2005 gubernatorial election turned up eight substantiated cases of people knowingly casting invalid votes. None, of course, was dead. That’s eight votes in another 2.3 million. And, a probe of charges by Wisconsin activists yielded seven substantiated cases of people knowingly casting invalid votes, all of them people with felony convictions. That was seven in 3 million votes cast. So, 21 cases of fraud in three states in which 7.6 million votes were cast. That’s three-ten-thousandths of one percent. These are not extreme examples. They are just three I picked out of the middle of the Brennan Center’s 50-page report on its probes of voter-fraud charges.
If TV ads and charges of fraud aren’t enough for you, here are two other bits of silliness. Portland is in the process of trying to eliminate the value of citizenship by letting non-citizens vote in city elections. Hard to get any sillier than that with a straight face. The Bangor Daily News editorialized against this devaluation of citizenship, as it should have.
And Kansas continues to scrub the names of black, Indian, Latino and other poor voters from its rolls, even though an investigation of its system has shown that Kansas has been wrong 99 percent of the time it has dropped someone’s name. That’s 99 in each 100.
On second thought, that’s not silly. That’s fraud in itself. Fraud against our sacred right and need to vote.
Bob Neal will follow the election campaigns closely. He hopes that Jean Shepherd was correct when he said, “The truth will always have a market.”
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