Have you noticed the intense hectoring to vote with no mention of the responsibility of the citizen to take the time and effort to be informed before they vote? If not, you should. It happens every election season. Make no mistake about it, this advertising campaign is not a benign and politically neutral activity, and doesn’t stop with media ad buys to “Rock the Vote”. It has infected how we vote and who’s counting the votes. The push is one that Tammany Hall would recognize in a heartbeat. The 2020 election became the playground for this new Tammany Hall. Beware Republicans, the wave election of your dreams in 2022 may not come to pass.
Tammany Hall is the model for the new corruption. Tammany Hall was the New York Democratic Party organization that controlled New York City and the state of New York for much of the second half of the 19th century. They used the immense human resource of millions of immigrants, many of them Irish, to build a vast voter base for electoral control. Ever wonder how the cliché of the Irish cop or fireman developed? The Hall provided “services” – jobs, housing, marriage for a daughter – in return for political loyalty, i.e., votes.
It was in the memorable words of George Washington Plunkett, one of its inestimable leaders, “honest graft”. They did some good to assist the needy and push public projects (honest), and they also got rich in the meantime (graft). Sounds like Maxine Waters? Though, it must be admitted, the motives and intentions of today’s modern incarnation of Tammany Hall are a bit different from Plunkett’s quaint formulation (Waters excluded). The old version lined the pockets of the organization’s operatives. The new edition hides an ideological partisanship behind philanthropy. Call it “honest rigging” for a revolution.
See, the Tammany Hall of old faced the same problem, in the same party, as our updated version. It’s called voter turnout. Both relied on demographic constituencies – the poor, minorities, immigrants, young, the loosely defined “oppressed” – that have a greater propensity to not vote. The Hall of the 1850’s addressed the problem by exploiting a loose election system that had no secret ballot. People voted with colored slips for the contending parties, so the Hall’s poll watchers knew who voted and how and could punish or award gratuities accordingly. Today’s revolutionary, techie copy employs vote-by-mail and big-moneyed philanthropy to grease the skids.
Like Plunkitt’s henchman, today’s manipulators abhor the secret ballot. The secret ballot, after checking identity, requires that people vote in a booth on a nondescript ballot which is deposited with no one knowing the contents. But such privacy is the enemy of maximizing turnout. The effort it takes to get registered, be prepared, and travel to a polling station is an obstacle to the lightly motivated, uninterested, easily inconvenienced, uninformed, and those of more frivolous priorities. Thus, the drive to replace the secret ballot with a mail-in one. The more carefree the process, the easier to overcome the massive reluctance that lies at the heart of their base.
The assassination of the secret ballot in 2020 began with the “philanthropy” of Zuckerbucks. Zuckerbucks were the $400 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla, hosed mostly to “underserved” districts, which are synonymous with Democratic Party bastions, to inflate turnout in those locales. The money was filtered through a hive of Democratic Party front groups to infiltrate the public election system, alter it to suit Democrat needs, and assist the counting and collection of the ballots. It’s not so much stealing an election as it is rigging one. They worked to make previously prohibited practices legal and operational. Call it an “honest steal”.
In many jurisdictions in 2020, ballots were shot-gunned to mail boxes and collected by third parties. New and suspicious euphemisms entered the lexicon like ballot “curing” and “harvesting”. Curing refers to the correction of errors on submitted mail-in ballots. Harvesting sanctions independent organizations to collect the mailed ballots. Instead of ward healers watching people drop colored slips of paper in the box, Zuckerbuck-funded activists lent their political acumen to the service of public election agencies. Activists were everywhere in the battleground states in “curing”, “harvesting”, in the administrative machinery of counting, and in Democrat-heavy neighborhoods. How else could a man who ran a presidential campaign from his basement still win? The fix was in.
The 2020 rogue’s gallery of Zuckerbuck-funded radical progressive electioneering groups was impressive. It began with 350 million Zuckerbucks to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), founded by lefty activists from the “Democratic Party’s Hogwarts for digital wizardry”, the New Organizing Institute. How’s that for networking? The CTCL then doled out the money to a wide array of political affiliates, mostly in battleground states. How’s that for networking?
Georgia was beset by the locusts of the progressive Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) to inflate the numbers out of urbanized Fulton, Gwinnet, Cobb, and DeKalb counties.
Wisconsin presented a special case. Partisan money and talent descended from many quarters. Power the Polls, the Mikva Challenge, the Brennan Center, the Center for Civic Design, the Democracy Fund, The Elections Group, the ironically named Center for Secure and Modern Elections, and the National Vote at Home Institute, amply manned with donkey party activists, consulted and in some cases took over the administration of the elections in highly urbanized parts of the state, all Democrat fiefdoms.
Trump is technically wrong to say that the election was stolen. Instead, many practices, previously prohibited, like massive mail-in voting and harvesting and curing, were legalized. In addition, no one had experienced such an infusion of partisan “philanthropy” into the machinery of the election process and were quite unprepared for it. The activist groups filled the gaps in the law in ways that were shady but not illegal. It was an “honest steal”, but still a completely corrupting one.
Trump’s strong post-election reaction may be more due to the embarrassment of being caught with his pants down. While his zealous supporters after the event engaged in a futile crusade to uncover enough fraud to overturn the election, few paid much attention to the systematic pre-election groundwork that was established to outsource the machinery of elections to shadowy partisans, and scarcely a squeak at the time from Trump and his people.
In essence, the Democratic Party reverted back to type. They have a proven track record of refusal to put any responsibility on the voter – whether it be the work to inform oneself or simply get out of the lounge chair – as well as hostility to the secret ballot.
Is a modern election merely a race to put the fate of the country in the hands of the uncaring, ill-informed, and uninterested? It seems so, but it’s more than that. It took some time for a group of grifters to form the original Tammany Hall and profit from the tradition of loosey-goosey elections. Similarly, a new Tammany Hall will evolve with its own boast of graft and fraud, this time in mammoth mail-in voting, no authentic voter ID, and an army of activists collecting, curing, and counting the votes, and on a national scale.
In that case, for the average bloke, why vote? We’ll probably wake up one morning – and many mornings after that – to discover that a widespread disgust with the course of public affairs did not translate into commensurate election results. In that sense, how would we be any different from Putin’s Russia?
RogerG
*Thanks to John Lott and Mollie Hemingway for their work on this subject.