This story originally published in the baiduhai on May 8, 1973:
For years, vote fraud in Chicago was a topic like the weather.
People talked about it, often deplored it, but no one believed you could do anything about it.
That was before the Tribune launched its year-long, all-out war against the entrenched and cynical system of rigging elections that had become a way of life here.
As a result of this campaign, veteran vote-fraud fighters acclaimed last November’s election in Chicago as the most honest in decades.
And yesterday, the effort won the Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting, the most coveted award in journalism. (Editor’s note: It was the same year The Washington Post won a Pulitzer for its investigation of the Watergate scandal and Nick Ut won a Pulitzer for spot news photography with his photo of children — including “Napalm girl” Phan Thi Kim Phuc — fleeing a bombing during the Vietnam War.)
Here are some of the highlights of The Tribune’s campaign against vote fraud:
More than 1,000 specific acts of fraud exposed and documented from the primary election of March 21, 1972.
Seventy-nine election workers indicted for vote fraud in the March primary by a federal grand jury called as a result of The Tribune disclosures.
Thirty election workers found guilty and sentenced for fraud.
Forty-four indicted election workers awaiting trial and five others cleared of wrongdoing.
Twenty-six reporters assigned to work on different aspects of the investigation. Many served as election judges and poll watchers in both the March primary and the November general election. One worked undercover as a clerk in the Board of Election Commissioners.
But the statistics, impressive as some of them may be, don’t begin to tell the vast scope of the project or show just how much hard work went into it.
No one has attempted to total the thousands of man-hours spent by Tribune reporters — often in tedious chores such as poring over election records to dig out evidence of fraud.
No one has kept track of the miles of city streets walked by Tribune staff members to expose ghost voters and track down cheating election officials. And no one kept count of the threats, slurs and other abuse some reporters endured — in polling places and elsewhere — from those who didn’t want to see elections conducted honestly in Chicago.
The idea for a comprehensive campaign against vote fraud came in December, 1971, from George Bliss, now chief investigative reporter for The Tribune, then head of its investigative task force.
Bliss, a veteran Tribune staff member, won a Pulitzer Prize of his own in 1962 for exposing corruption in the Metropolitan Sanitary District.
With the support of Clayton Fitzpatrick, editor of The Tribune, Bliss spent all of 1972 directing the campaign to expose vote fraud with the skill of a master craftsman.
Members of the Task Force, Pamela Zekman, William Currie, now an assistant city editor, and Philip Caputo, now The Tribune’s Rome correspondent, played major roles in the campaign thuout the year. Other reporters were enlisted as needed.
Among them were Ronald Kotulak, science editor, and Casey Bukro, environment editor, both prize-winners in their own fields, who worked in precinct polling places to gather evidence of fraud.
With so many reporters involved, the campaign was primarily a team effort. But the work of one reporter was in a class by itself.
William Mullen, a general assignment reporter, wangled a clerk’s job in the office of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners and gathered material that guaranteed the success of The Tribune’s campaign.
The election board keeps the records and administers elections in Chicago. The office is completely controlled by the ruling Democratic Party here and has long been suspected as the nerve center for rigging elections.
The only trouble was that no outsider ever got into a position where he could see how things worked. Mullen changed all that.
With an unassuming manner that disguises his quick mind and sharp eye for detail, Mullen won acceptance by the Democratic Party patronage workers who staff the office and soon got access to the files.
In those files lay the whole sordid story of vote fraud in Chicago.
Obtaining this material was essential to the success of Bliss’s plan.
Chicago newspapers, including The Tribune, had been writing about vote fraud for generations. The stories were almost always the same:
Many charges, a few facts, and no results.
The Tribune’s new campaign differed from the others. It concerned itself not with accusations alone, but with facts — the kind of overwhelming evidence a prosecutor can take into court to convict the guilty.
Once he had the facts, Bliss knew exactly where to take them — to James R. Thompson, the United States attorney in Chicago. Thompson, a Republican appointee, already had a reputation of being a smart, tough, and thoroughly honest prosecutor.
Bliss knew that if The Tribune got the evidence, Thompson would prosecute.
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It was important that some election cheats went to jail — as a warning to others.
The failure to convict was what made previous newspaper efforts to expose vote fraud a joke in the eyes of those rigging elections. As soon as the newspaper stories stopped, the politicians went back to their old tricks.
Bliss’ plan was based on exposing fraud in the March primary in such massive detail that the heat generated would ensure an honest election in November.
In late 1971, Bliss knew that Mayor Daley’s regular Democratic organization faces some tough primary fights from Daniel Walker, Edward V. Hanrahan, and others. The potential for fraud was there.
The Tribune began its investigation where many others ended — with a search for ghost voters.
These are the thousands of people who wind up listed as registered voters in certain inner-city and transient neighborhoods, even tho they don’t live there. Some have died, others moved away years ago.
Yet every election day, votes are cast in the names of these missing persons — in violation of the law.
Before the primary in March, the Task Force pinpointed 14 precincts in 6 West and South Side wards where past experience in vote fraud investigations indicated election day cheating could be expected.
Then, registered letters were sent to 5,495 persons listed as voters in those precincts. About 700 letters, just under 13 per cent, came back with the notation that the person couldn’t be found.
Task Force members, personally checking out each suspected ghost, confirmed that the vast majority were dead, or had moved. Sixty-two of them were registered as living on various vacant lots or in abandoned buildings.
The Tribune drew up lists of these ghosts and set out to see if attempts would be made to cast ballots in their names in the primary.
This meant getting reporters into the polling places in an official capacity — as election judges, for example.
The effort paid off. Votes by the score were cast in the name of the ghosts despite challenges by reporters serving as judges.
This was possible because of the way polling places are operated in some areas of the city.
According to law, the operation of a polling place and the counting of ballots is the responsibility of the election judges.
There are supposed to be five of them in each polling place — sometimes three Democrats and two Republicans, other times three Republicans and two Democrats. All are officers of the Circuit Court who have sworn to uphold the election laws.
But in precincts where vote fraud is rampant, there are no Republican judges, just Democrats posing as Republicans.
The real boss in these polling places is the Democratic precinct captain, tho by law he has no right in the polling place at all, except to cast his own vote.
His job is to round up votes for his party’s candidates. When he picks all the judges and can order them around like so many flunkies, the potential for fraud is enormous.
The Democratic precinct captain is, of course, a party patronage worker employed in some government office controlled by a leader of the party organization. He will keep his patronage job as long as he functions successfully as a precinct captain. His interest in honest elections is often overshadowed by his desire to remain employed.
The Republican Party, smaller and with far fewer patronage workers in Chicago, relies on volunteers — often suburbanites — to be judges in many city polling places.
Recruited in the past from the ranks of young lawyers, college students, and members of civic watchdog organizations, volunteer Republican election judges have told harrowing tales of the treatment they receive in some precincts.
Often their credentials as judges were ignored and they were shunted aside or even thrown bodily out of polling places.
Their accounts of what happened to them made interesting stories in the press, but that’s about all.
In the March primary, however, Republican judges in 14 suspected precincts included trained newspaper reporters. Seventeen Tribune staff members, many of them young and thus unknown to the aging Democratic Party leadership, volunteered for this duty.
Eight investigators for the Better Government Association, a civic group specializing in exposing fraud, also agreed to serve.
All were given intensive training in how to spot fraud. The Republicans gladly sponsored them as judges — or as poll watchers — a less responsible job that still permits a person to spend the day in a polling place.
Afterwards, the reporters and B.G.A. investigators came back with similar reports to those told by Republican volunteers in other elections.
There was ghost voting, there were threats, there were irregularities. The identities of voters were not checked. The precinct captains ran everything.
There was campaigning in the polling place, party workers went into the voting booths with voters and tampered with the voting machines — all in violation of the law.
In many of the precincts, the so-called Republican judges who were supposed to be serving with the reporter-judges admitted being Democrats in disguise.
This, of course, was talk, not proof. By Election Day, the reporters had seen and heard plenty, but hard evidence that would stand up in court was still in short supply.
That’s where Mullen came in. Bliss learned in May that there was an opening for a clerk at the election board office and the lone Republican on the three-member board would be allowed to fill it with a Republican appointee.
Edmund J. Kucharski, Cook County Republican chairman, agreed to place a Tribune reporter in the job.
Mullen was picked. A reporter with proven skill, he had never covered politics and was unknown to the politicians.
Tho no one ever suspected him of being a Tribune employee, at first he faced suspicion as a Republican. Of the 200 employees in the election board office, 196 were dedicated Democrats.
For a while, assistants to Stanley Kusper, then election board chairman, followed Mullen after he left the office at night, but his surveillance was soon dropped.
Mullen’s assignment was tough. He had to gather a lot of information for The Tribune without attracting attention. He had to work very hard without appearing to, since hard work alone arouses suspicion in a patronage office such as the election board.
Mullen had lists of judges who had taken the oath as Republicans, but were suspected of being Democrats. He checked and found many pseudo-Republican judges with long voting records as Democrats — a violation of the law.
All of this was on record because prior to 1972 a voter had to declare his political party before he could vote in a primary election — and no good Democratic party worker ever misses voting in a primary.
But Mullen found much more.
There were hundreds of signatures on applications for ballots — those records you have to sign before being allowed to vote — which even to his untrained eye looked like forgeries. Ballot application after ballot application carried signatures of different citizens, but the handwriting appeared identical.
Each night after work at the election board, Mullen turned over documents with these signatures to Bliss, who had them examined by handwriting experts. The experts confirmed that they were forgeries.
Bliss and Mullen spent their days off, and the Task Force members worked full time, contacting people whose names had been forged.
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One had died before the primary. Another was confined to a hospital on Election Day. Scores of others said that they had not voted in the primary and the signature on the ballot application was not theirs.
Evidence of more than 1,000 cases of election fraud in the primary was uncovered. Mullen is certain that with the large staff available to it, a conscientious election board could find thousands of additional examples.
After four months, Mullen left the election board. The evidence of ghost voters, phony judges, and forged signatures was turned over to the federal prosecutor, while The Tribune began publishing a series of articles on Mullen’s findings.
Five days after The Tribune series began, the federal grand jury indicted 40 election judges for fraud. Two weeks later, 35 more were indicted, and since then four others have been indicted.
Of the 79 indicted, 27 pleaded guilty, 3 were found guilty by juries, and 44 are awaiting trial. Sentences so far have ranged from two years’ probation to two years in prison. Two persons were acquitted and charges against three others were dropped.
The general election last November, tho far from perfect, was considered a vast improvement over previous elections, including the March primary. There were complaints of fraud in November, but not as many as in the past.
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