By CHARLES B. CLEVELAND
Stolen elections? Close look at voting habits discredits
OVER THE YEARS two great libels have grown up around Illinois politics. One says Chicago Democrats steal all elections; the other says the real vote thieves are downstate Republicans.
All elections are not pure. In some Chicago precincts you can find voters who expect to get paid for showing up at the polls, and it's not unknown elsewhere in the state that some of the niceties of residence get winked at. But, like an old man's reminiscing about his youth, the facts about vote irregularities are overstated.
With a Presidential election coming up next year, along with key state and local races, it is worth reexamining those charges. Part of the problem stems from the fact that most voters are unaware that election night figures are unofficial; they are collected primarily for the use of radio, television and newspapers and the costs are borne by the media.
In the case of Chicago, the results are accumulated by City News Bureau, a local news reporting service, which also reports results from Chicago's immediate suburbs. Cook County uses voting machines—the type that let the voter pull levers which record totals on counters in the machine. Other counties use another type of voting machine which has cards punched by the voter with a stylus. These punch cards, in turn, are processed by computers. Also, many downstate counties still use paper ballots.
Chicago returns come to the media rapidly. In one typical election, 11 per cent of the vote was reported less than 90 minutes after the polls closed; almost 60 per cent was tabulated by 10 p.m. By contrast, Chicago's suburbs had reported just over 1 per cent by 10 o'clock. By midnight Chicago had reported more than 85 per cent of its vote, the suburbs just about half. Because Chicago is Democratic and the suburbs, in most elections, are Republican the first returns by the Chicago media will show strong Democratic figures during the hours most election watchers are awake. This early strength is also exaggerated by the fact that small precincts with strong party loyalties are likely to report in promptly.
In the same typical election, a mid-Illinois city which normally votes Republican showed a similar early Democratic trend, but the trend eased off by the time final returns came in. This was 1970, the year Democrats swept the top three offices with U.S. Senator Adlai Stevenson, State Treasurer Alan Dixon and Superintendent of Public Instruction Michael Bakalis. With a fifth of the vote in, Democrat Stevenson led Republican Ralph Smith by 16 percentage points, but the lead gradually slipped until the two men wound up almost even.
The combination of trends to the casual observer suggests Cook County loads up its Democratic strength early, but then downstate retaliates with its "hidden" votes for Republicans in the late evening hours. In reality, it is from these voting trends and the pattern of reporting—not sinister politics—that the changing tides occur on election night.
Total votes for the various candidates are part of the record and visible evidence of voting behavior. Much less clear are the patterns of individual voters—who they are, why they go to the polls, or why they don't. There have been some important studies by political scientists, all based on post-election interviews. But when I first started looking closely at individual voting habits a few years ago, I could not find a single study based on actual voting. Since then I have examined several hundred thousand ballots in various Illinois communities and one of my colleagues is now preparing a detailed computer-aided study. One of the things I learned was that as many as two or three in every hundred who go to the polls spoil their ballots completely; they may just as well have stayed home. These are persons who fail to mark a paper ballot correctly or misuse the voting machine.
The number of errors in some precincts can be as high as one in every five. In one low income precinct, I found 24 out of 125 voters had turned in what amounted to blank ballots.
Voters will also make single errors instead of consistently making errors on an entire ballot. Curiously enough, this seems to happen mostly in major offices, and voters make few errors when voting, let's say, for sheriff. Another finding: The "independent" voter seems to be scarcer than most people believe; only about three in every 100 voters come close to splitting their ballots down the middle; another 14 in every 100 will give one party about 75 per cent of their votes, the other 25 per cent to the other party.
Another voter tendency: About one of five or six will break party lines for Judicial candidates—voting for one Democrat and one Republican as though they were consciously seeking a divided court.
There are also a considerable number—maybe five or six in every 100—who go to the polls solely to vote for one candidate, maybe two. Such a candidate is either a very popular local nominee, or, in some instances, a candidate under considerable criticism.
And then there's the voter in Grundy County who persists in writing his name and address on the ballot, even though it spoils his ballot. "I don't care," he says, "I want everybody to know how I feel."
318 / Illinois Issues / October 1975