Remember when it was fun to vote?

Remember what a physical thrill it was to close the curtain, gaze at the variety of options, hear the decisive metallic click as you snapped the switches next to the candidates' names and then, best of all, pull with all your might that big lever that simultaneously re-opened the secret curtain and recorded those votes?

"Slam!" it went. And in some cases it resounded a lot more when a voter could record his enthusiasm or her discontent with one mighty pull. When former Mayor Michael Bilandic botched the snow removal from the Blizzard of '79, for example, Chicagoans got to use those big metal machines one last time. And snow- weary voters went behind the curtain by the thousands, snapped down the

Jane Byrne switch and yanked on the lever. It was not only a symbolic act of discontent; it was a physical act of anger. And it sure was fun.

Jump forward to today, when voters — happy or sad, content or angry — walk up to a shaky cardboard box, flip pages in a miniature loose-leaf booklet and jab at little holes with a fingertip stylus, like a fussy tailor hemming a pair of trousers. No joy

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Jump forward to today when voters — happy or sad, content or angry — walk up to a shaky cardboard box, flip pages in a miniature loose-leaf booklet and jab at little holes with a fingertip stylus, like a fussy tailor hemming a pair of trousers.

there; no physical thrill; no fun. Jab, poke and it's over.

The system has gotten technically pure, ostensibly to ensure the citizenry an honest election. In fact, the changes have merely forced election day magicians to come up with some new tricks.

There has been much lamenting in recent years about the death of the Machine. But in most cases it concerns the vaunted Cook County Democratic Machine. Few people talk about the end of the voting machine, those big bulky thousand-pound behemoths that were moved into church basements and school hallways for Election Day. If you are under 36, you probably never voted on one of them in Illinois, anyway, unless you live in East St. Louis, which just last year was the last major Illinois governmental unit to dispose of them.

The old machines had a lot of flaws. And The Good Old Days were not all that good. The late Cook County Clerk Eddie Barrett, for instance, was found guilty in Federal District Court in the early 1970s for taking kickbacks from a Pennsylvania voting machine manufacturer. The head of the company testified throughout the country in the trials of dozens of elected officials who took bribes to buy his machines, noting casually that $100 a machine was the going rate in Cook County and every other place where he sold his wares.

Those heavy machines also had to be moved to polling places a couple times a year, and politically connected firms were usually hired to do the moving and the storage. There's a good piece of City Hall lore about a newly appointed member of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners who showed up in the chairman's office the day after his selection, demanding the voting machine moving business. He was turned down, primarily because the conflict of interest would have been too visible, even for Chicago's City Hall.

Of course, the corruption potential of those voting machines extended outside the walls of City Hall. Back in the days when vote fraud was something to be bragged about, the machines were ready-made for overzealous precinct captains and ward heelers. It was not uncommon for law enforcement visitors to arrive unannounced before the first voter and find that some of the machines had, mysteriously, already recorded dozens of votes. That was the technological equivalent of ballot box stuffing during the paper ballot days. (Incidentally, the Chicago Election Board made a little money several years back by selling those old wooden ballot boxes imprinted with the city's name. Apparently, Chicago vote fraud items rank right up there with Al Capone memorabilia.)

As for tallying the vote on the machines, it was left to the honesty of election judges in each precinct to open the back, phone in the totals, then send the sealed results to City Hall for the "official" canvass days later.

Sometimes, the end-of-day tally didn't meet expectations. But in some cases, it exceeded them. One of the most-told City Hall Election Day stories is the one about the longtime precinct captain who found to his delight that at the end of the voting day, the machines in his precinct showed the opposition candidate had received no votes. This captain had delivered the legendary "Zero Precinct," the equivalent of a baseball perfect game or a 300 score in bowling — the culmination of his political years of trenchwork. But alas, the story goes, the Democratic ward committeeman was so distressed that such a perfect political act might attract the attention of nosy federal investigators he ordered the once-triumphant, now- deflated precinct captain back into the polling places to "steal" a few votes for the other side.

In addition to rustling up voters, a precinct captain has always had to make sure they voted right once they got there. Though the curtain on those big old machines hid voters' hands, it didn't hide their feet, and that's what precinct captains watched in the old days. On the face of the machine, the straight ticket lever was on the far left, and precinct captains watched to be sure that a voter, after entering the booth, stayed at the left side. His biggest fear was "The Dance," which indicated the voter was moving down the machine, picking and choosing candidates for each office, rather than blindly casting a vote of confidence with a pull on the straight ticket lever.

One of the most impressive feats of straight ticket voting, though, came, surprisingly, not through the old-fashioned voting machines, but in one of the first-time uses of the flimsy modern contraptions. In 1982, newly installed Cook County Democratic Organiza- tion chairman Edward Vrdolyak flexed his political muscle and showed he could deliver votes in a seemingly unwinnable gubernatorial race between incumbent Republican Gov. James R. Thompson and Democratic challenger Adiai Stevenson.

"Punch 10," trumpeted Vrdolyak, who coupled that simple, easily understood message with a huge voter registration drive. "Punch 10" meant a straight Democratic ticket. And though Stevenson lost statewide, Vrdolyak won big in Chicago, proving that a powerful political machine can still turn out straight ticket votes, even when the voters are armed with tiny pushpins rather than 1, 000-pound machines.

The little boxes were designed to save money and protect voter integrity through computer technology, but lifelong politicians saw them more as a challenge than a permanent impediment.

One major vote fraud technique was "chain voting," where a wily precinct

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captain would obtain a blank punch card, often by securing an absentee ballot, and punch in the "right" votes. He would then give the prepunched card to a voter — sometimes solicited off the street with a few bucks or a bottle of cheap wine — have him go in to vote, drop the prepunched card in the box on the way out and hand the precinct captain another unpunched card. The "chain" could go on all day, as long as cooperating voters could be found and friendly election judges didn't examine things too closely.

Another method was the "BB trick," in which an election worker would go in to vote, drop a BB into the booklet hole of an opponent and leave. Subsequent voters would try in vain to puncture the punchcard with the tiny needle, but the hidden BB would prevent it. One longtime "observer" noted that although the trick would only prevent a few opposition votes before it was discovered, a few votes several times a day would add up. Vote fraud, he said seriously, is a cumulative thing, and the trick bag must have more than one trick in it.

Sometimes the new "theft-proof" system was thwarted after

the cards were collected. In the 1980s, then-Cook County Clerk Stanley Kusper, himself a former Chicago Election Board member, explained the days-long lag between Election Day and the final vote count by saying high humidity in his office had caused the paper cards to swell, making them difficult to feed into a computer. As anyone familiar with voting chicanery knows, time is the enemy of honesty.

Thomas Leach, an affable spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners for decades, says the latest computer system, which will go into effect in Chicago this month, and probably throughout the state of Illinois in the near future, is the closest thing so far to fraudproof voting. "The voter directly inserts his punched card into the tally machine, and only the voter ever touches the card. And the machine will even reject uninitialed ballots. And at the end of the day, the computerized vote totals will be sent directly from the polling place to downtown."

Leach says that system, which is expected to cost about $14 million, will be tested in six Chicago wards in the March 21 primary election, and should be expanded to all 50 wards in the November presidential election.

Although the Chicago Election Board touts the new system as the wave of the future, the future is already waving back in some parts of America, where there is talk of experimenting with Internet voting. The vision, as yet unrealized, is for millions of voters to plop down at their home computers or office work stations, call up their precinct Web sites, sign in and vote.

Illustration by Mike Cramer

Click. That's it. No trip to the polling place in the wind and cold. No nodding and smiling at the election workers standing out- side, pretending you're going to vote for their candidates. No socializing for the old folks, for whom a visit to the polling place can be the Event of the Day. And it will all be on the square.

Just click. That's it. Supposedly. But even as election officials plot new ways to make voting as honest and simple as possible, those whose jobs are to guarantee the results of elections even before the polls close are plotting ways to get around them. Things change. But some things stay the same. In the good old days, when it was fun to vote, those guys used to be called political hacks. In the future, they might just be called political hackers. 

Robert Davis is a former reporter and editor at the Chicago Tribune, where he covered City Hall politicians and vote thieves for more than 30 years. He now teaches journalism at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

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