THE CHICAGO WAY- AND HOW IT IMPACTS THE 8TH DISTRICT

[carol ann parisi]

From SMART GIRL POLITICS:

The "Chicago Way" of Voting and Vote Counting, 2010

• Posted by David McNeil on November 14, 2010 at 2:00pm
• View David McNeil's blog

In northwest Chicagoland, the winner of the race to represent Illinois' 8th Congresional District remains undecided. For the past week Republican challenger Joe Walsh has held a 347-vote lead over Democrat incumbent Melissa Bean - out of approximately 200,000 votes counted. The 8th district contains parts of three counties. On Election Day, Walsh won handily in Lake and McHenry counties while Bean won all precincts in the Chicago suburbs in Cook County. Lake and McHenry counties continue to hold all validly postmarked absentee ballots received after Election Day and will count them on November 16. Although the Cook County Clerk has continued tabulating absentee ballots as they arrive at his Chicago office, a potential flood of election-deciding illegal ballots may have been averted by the quick actions of Mr. Nick Provenzano, Joe Walsh's campaign manager.

A week after the election I called Mr. Provenzano to congratulate him on his apparent victory. He immediately darkened my mood. “Let’s hope you’re not premature,” he said, “We’re trying to deal with irregularities from the Bean campaign and the Cook County Clerk’s office.”

Provenzano offered details that are shocking, though not surprising to anyone familiar with Cook County elections. Ballots from six Cook County precincts had gone missing on election night. A few hours later they turned up in Elgin, a Democrat stronghold 40 miles northwest of Chicago. Early Wednesday morning these ballots were transported to Cicero, “for safekeeping” said the Clerk’s office. Some things are better kept safe in Cicero than others. Ballots are not high on the list. Due to these six precincts, election night updates on the vote count stalled at “97% precincts reporting.”

Provenzano had much more to tell in our brief conversation. As absentee ballots continued to trickle in, the Bean campaign made two highly unusual requests of the Cook County Clerk’s Office. They asked for a computer file of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of all Cook County residents of the 8th District who had requested absentee ballots but had not yet returned them. They also wanted a downloadable image file of a blank Cook County absentee ballot. Both requests were immediately granted. The Walsh campaign learned of this when, unbidden, these files were also emailed to them (“out of fairness” they were told) by someone in the Clerk’s office who apparently feared repercussions were the file transfers to Bean made known.

Nick Provenzano has 25 years of experience in Cook County politics, almost all of it on the losing side. He had some ideas about how to react to the unfolding corruption. He restaffed the campaign's phone banks and tasked callers with working the list provided by the County. What he found was disturbing. A number of calls were fielded by staff at residential centers for the mentally disabled. Alleged potential voters were not allowed to come to the phone. Others calls determined that mentally and physically disabled nursing home residents had received ballots. One claimed she had personally signed and returned hers. Investigation revealed she was unable to hold a pen.

It is not known whether her ballot was actually received and tabulated. Another unanswered question is whether there were thousands like hers that were falsified and counted.

Other inquiry discovered that a would-be voter had died before casting his absentee ballot. In fact, he died well before requests for absentee ballots were accepted. Several from the list no longer lived at the addresses to which absentee ballots were sent – for as many as fifteen years. Who requested these ballots? Who received them? How many like them were returned and counted?

Faced with all this, Provenzano enlisted the help of the Illinois GOP, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Committee to dispatch observers to the Clerk’s office. He also retained Mayer, Platt, and Brown, a distinguished Chicago law firm and, specifically, partner Tyrone Fahner, a former Illinois Attorney General.

Meanwhile, Lake and McHenry Counties, operating in a different mode, were cheerfully announcing updates of the numbers of valid absentee ballots received and being held until November 16. Anyone with a calculator could accurately estimate how many more votes needed to come out of Cook County to put Bean ahead. And anyone with a roster of unreturned ballots and an image file of a blank ballot could provide them.

Provenzano also requested that the Cook County Clerk’s office retain all envelopes with ballots returned after election day, so that their postmark could be verified. He did this while awaiting a court order to this effect. The Clerk’s office simply refused. They continued to separate ballots from envelopes and to discard envelopes before their postmark could be verified.

Among the Cook County absentee ballots counted after Election Day, Bean received approximately 70% – a dramatically higher percentage than her Cook County Election Day results. Since the Walsh campaign stepped up its involvement, absentee returns have fallen off significantly – in fact as logic and experience predict they should. There had been persistent rumors of an impending huge pro-Bean “ballot dump”. It appears that Provenzano’s alacritous responses may have staved it off.

All this, however, may be considered “retail” election fraud. As I write, the local Salem Radio Network affiliate is interviewing knowledgeable experts about the possibilities of "wholesale" fraud. According to them, voting machines in Cook County recorded different totals than what their paper tapes revealed. In addition, the paper record was often at variance with how voters said they wanted to vote.