Election fraud Chicago style: Illinois’ decades-old notoriety for election corruption is legendary

These days, opportunities for corruption may have shrunk for civil servants, but not for business leaders

Published February 14, 2016 2:00PM (EST)

Mary Frances Berry   (Jim Abbott)
Mary Frances Berry (Jim Abbott)

Excerpted from "Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy"

He went to “every hotel and flophouse in the West Sideward to pay for votes and obtain lists of people who had died or moved and would not be voting.”

—Raymond Hicks

Democrats in Illinois were deeply concerned about voter turnout in the November 2014 elections. Political strategists had declared incumbent governor Pat Quinn the most vulnerable candidate in the nation, with razor-thin margins against the Republican candidate, wealthy venture capitalist Bruce Rauner. Rauner put $6 million from his own pocket into his campaign, making Chicago’s overwhelmingly Democratic voters a potentially deciding factor in the race.

Alderwoman Leslie Hairston, whose Fifth Ward covered Chicago’s South Shore and Hyde Park neighborhoods, was a good machine politician. Though she herself was not up for reelection, she too worried about turnout. To encourage voters, she offered residents in her ward a chance to participate in a raffle for gift cards from Walgreens, Starbucks, Potbelly, and other places. Raffle “tickets” would be given out free to anyone who voted in November. Hairston posted the raffle offer on Facebook and other social media.

Hairston’s former opponent, Anne Marie Miles, complained to the Cook County state’s attorney election hotline that giving out prizes for voting was prohibited under Illinois election law. Questioned by the news media about the legality of the raffle, Hairston defended the offer: “I’m owning it, yeah. I’m owning it. Absolutely.” The election office said they were “looking into the matter.” Like most states, Illinois doesn’t have a special agency to investigate election fraud. As in almost every other state, voters in Illinois elect their state attorneys and their judges. But when editorials in the local press accused Hairston of vote buying, she backed off and canceled the raffle. In the heat of the Quinn-Rauner election, the raffle story disappeared. Hairston’s raffle was made in good faith, a rather benign gesture compared to the vote buying and election fraud that occurs in Louisiana and some other states. Illinois law prohibits giving benefits to encourage voting, even if not directed at influencing a vote for a particular candidate. Federal law prohibits paying a voter. Yet states as different as Louisiana and Massachusetts permit giving incentives to vote for nonpartisan purposes; the incentive cannot be intended to influence the voter’s choice. The vote buying and electoral fraud that occurs in Chicago is not so different from the cases Greg Malveaux investigated in Louisiana. But Illinois and Chicago have different approaches to election corruption, offering an opportunity to weigh the effectiveness of other responses.

Illinois’s tight laws don’t seem to reduce reports of fraud any more than in Louisiana, New York, and other states where elected officials face jail time for abusing the public trust. Quinn, who lost his reelection bid, became the fourth consecutive governor to face a federal investigation for corruption.

A political scientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago concluded, “The Chicago metropolitan region has been the most corrupt area in the country since 1976,” in an obdurate race to the bottom with Louisiana’s record. According to that 2012 study, Illinois is the third-most corrupt state in the union, after New York and California.

In addition, four consecutive corrupt governors and nearly one-third of Chicago’s one hundred alderpersons since 1973 have been convicted of corruption, mostly involving bribes to influence government decisions or for personal financial benefit. Yet corruption is not a one-party party: the Republicans dominating the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, and Mississippi have had the highest number of corruption cases in the country in the last four decades, when states are ranked by convictions of public officials per capita. In contrast, Oregon, Washington State, and Utah are the least corrupt.

Taking money or gifts for a politician’s own benefit is a widely agreed upon form of corruption. But are politicians and political parties who give out small amounts of money or small gifts to voters necessarily corrupt? Get-out-the-vote efforts coordinated by churches, nonprofit organizations, corporations, and political parties are permissible election activities, provided they don’t demand voters cast their ballots for a specific candidate. But giving gifts, as in the case of Hairston’s raffle idea, is considered suspicious activity. Though state legislatures and Congress have passed numerous laws against political corruption, it is up to prosecutors to decide whom they will charge with corruption. As the previous chapters on Louisiana exposed, the intractable problem of electoral fraud is that prosecutors themselves are elected and dependent on voters (and political money) to remain in power. This is one of the primary reasons why cases of election fraud almost never hook the sharks, but instead scoop up the little fish.

The raffle set up by Alderwoman Hairston didn’t seek to exploit donors seeking favorable votes or even steer voters into supporting Governor Quinn. But it turns out that the raffle was nonetheless illegal under Illinois election law, which does not account for nuance or purpose. Illinois legislators wanted to prevent candidates from offering inducements to voters. Yet in Kentucky and elsewhere, “ginger cakes” and other door prizes as rewards for voting might be given out by local governments as rewards to citizens exercising the privilege of democracy. The key factor is to not use such incentives to influence the vote for a particular candidate.

Do campaign promises and special programs constitute inducements to voters? In Illinois, Governor Quinn was charged with corruption not because he promised to establish community-based programs to prevent gun violence but because he actually created one. His antiviolence initiative, “The Neighborhood Recovery Initiative,” launched before his first full-term governor’s race, did not have the usual features of an illegal incentive. The initiative gave money to community groups on Chicago’s South Side and south suburbs to establish antiviolence programs, and to stop the shootings of innocent bystanders, many of whom were children.

After Quinn won the 2010 election, his critics began calling the Neighborhood Recovery Initiative a political slush fund to influence the largely Democratic voters in South Chicago. They demanded that the FBI and the state investigate. The withering criticism forced Quinn to drop a program his constituents wanted and needed.  Despite this, the investigations continued. The state auditor found the Initiative hastily implemented and sloppily organized, though he did not find any wrongdoing on the part of the governor. However, the charges helped to undermine Quinn’s 2014 bid for reelection.

Illinois’s decades-old notoriety for election corruption is legendary. Many people still remember stories about the first Mayor Richard A. Daley rigging the presidential election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, for example, but even in those times, electoral fraud was probably common in local elections. In fact, the bigger news in the 1960 election was that State’s Attorney Benjamin Adamowski, a Republican running for reelection, was posed to run against Richard J. Daley in the next mayoral race. Common knowledge attributed his loss most definitely to fraud.

To counter political corruption in Chicago, attorney Michael Shakman coordinated a series of lawsuits beginning in 1969 that protected city employees from the whims and wrath of elected officials. Patronage jobs, which award government jobs to party loyalists for turning out votes and support in favor of a candidate, are not necessarily corrupt and were long perfectly legal; among other examples, President Lincoln created the office of postmaster general precisely so someone else would take over the onerous task of appointing Republican loyalists to local post office jobs. But Democratic pols in Chicago did the Grand Old Party one better: they expected appointees to pay up at election time, shaking down civil servants for campaign “donations” so they could keep their jobs. Shakman won judicial decrees ending the practice. “Shakman decrees” did not abolish patronage hiring, nor did they address the “work around” that later Chicago mayors created. During his five terms in office (1989–2011), Mayor Richard M. Daley initiated the practice of contracting government services out to companies who could hire whomever they wished, including an elected official’s supporters, friends, and family.

Election officials knew about and permitted some patronage to continue, even when it bordered on fraud—at least until they themselves were caught. In the Chicago and Illinois general election of November 1982, twenty-six people, a majority of them election officials, were indicted for election fraud in federal court. The case was brought by Dan Webb, the Republican US attorney, who had federal jurisdiction since the ballot included a congressional race in addition to local and state offices. People accused Webb of targeting Democrats, but officials of both parties used illegal practices to maintain their hold on office. Democrats were especially concerned about Republican vote fraud outside of Chicago, which they claimed was the reason why their gubernatorial candidate Adlai Stevenson lost the election.

Conviction for violating federal election law carries a potential fine of not more than ten thousand dollars or imprisonment for up to five years, or both. This was a high-stakes indictment. The Chicago Board of Election Commissioners appoints election judges, choosing among nominees submitted by the Democratic and Republican parties, with confirmation by the Cook County Circuit Court.

Witnesses accused the defendants of forging signatures, impersonating voters, registering ineligible voters, “assisting” older or disabled voters, bribing voters, illegally dispensing and voting absentee ballots, and using weapons and force to persuade voters and campaign workers. One official was accused of running a ballot through the tabulator two hundred times in order to increase his candidate’s margin of victory.

Joe Novak, a longtime Chicago political operative who knew the intimate details of the election system, explained in 2002 that election fraud still worked the way it had for years. “Precinct captains still like to control the vote by pushing absentees.” The captain goes to a retirement center or other places where the elderly gather and gets a signed statement from a voter that they can’t make it to the polls on Election Day. The captain can tell the voter how to vote. The idea is “Captains like to be ranked No. 1” in their ward organization. Alderman Joseph Moore from the Forty-Ninth Ward added, “The captain will offer to take (a completed absentee ballot) downtown for you.”  “Until they tightened the rules a few years ago,” Moore said, “it was common to see captains bringing in buckets full of ballots.”

A Chicago Tribune investigation of massive fraud, published in January 1983, led Webb to announce that his investigators would “use a computer” (which was at the time an innovative crime-fighting technology) to determine how many dead people were registered to vote or registered in more than one location throughout the city’s 2,910 precincts. Overall, 10 percent of Chicago’s one million votes for governor, mayor, city council, and other public officials were alleged to be fraudulent. “The fraud we uncovered in these indictments is so great, the scheme so intense, that the exact number of votes stolen in the November elections is unknown,” Webb announced at a press conference revealing the arrest of ten officials on the city’s West Side.

“Electoral fraud Chicago style” was highly coordinated among Democrats, with a few Republican facilitators thrown in as nonpartisan accessories. Webb’s case focused on activities in the Seventeenth Precinct in the Twenty-Seventh Ward, where votes were bought and sold for a cup of cocoa, two dollars, a glass of wine, or a cigarette. The ringleader was Democratic precinct captain Raymond Hicks, who coordinated ballot box stuffing with the assistance of precinct election judges. At a meeting at the L & B Chicken Restaurant, Hicks told precinct officials that all the elderly and mentally disabled people in a residential care home were “crazy.” He said to simply “punch 10” on the computerized absentee ballot for every resident, which were all votes for Democratic candidates. When Webb examined the voters’ ballot signatures against other records, his team discovered one resident whose full name appeared signed on his application, even though he had “no fingers or thumbs and can write only an ‘X’ by holding a pen between the stumps of his hands.”

Elsewhere in the precinct, the “standard operating procedure” for stealing votes was similar. Hicks, who pleaded guilty in exchange for testifying against others, recounted “visiting every hotel and flophouse in the West Side ward to pay for votes and obtain lists of people who had died or moved and would not be voting.” One hotel clerk demanded a case of wine, which Hicks supplied in exchange for a list of residents.

Throughout press coverage of the trials, newspaper reporters stressed that Hicks and his codefendants faced up to fifteen years in federal prison for defrauding voters. When the sentences were announced in December 1983, however, federal judge James Moran punished the conspirators lightly. Hicks received the longest sentence, nine months on work-release at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, with an additional five years on probation. He kept his day job as a laborer in the Chicago sewer system (where, perhaps not incidentally, his boss was one of the Ward 27 Democratic Party leaders). The others also received work-release sentences ranging from six month to ten days. One person, Francis Olinger, a Republican election judge, was also ordered to enter an alcoholic rehabilitation light sentences by the federal court for electoral fraud in Chicago show the reluctance to punish people under the current system.

In another Chicago case involving election fraud, city jobs, and Democratic ward bosses, US Attorney Webb brought indictments against Edward “Captain Eddie” Howard and Thomas Cusack, who he contended were loyalists to Thirty-Ninth Ward alderman Anthony Laurino. The key witness had been promised a city job by Howard if he helped cast absentee ballots for fictional, nonexistent, or deceased ward residents. In addition, a Democratic election judge and her daughter, a Republican election judge in the same precinct, permitted Howard to cast a ballot for another family member, a marine stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. A jury ultimately convicted Howard on twenty-three counts; he received nine months of work-release and five years’ probation. Cusack, convicted on fourteen counts, received six months’ work-release and five years’ probation.

Testifying before Congress later that year, Webb was asked to explain why the vast majority of cases he prosecuted were against campaign workers, election officials, and precinct captains. It’s “very simple,” he said. “We have discovered that those [officials] are the most culpable people in connection with the vote fraud that occurs on Election Day.” The system encouraged deceit because “there [was] an unmistakable link between the patronage system and vote fraud.” Chicago’s patronage system created incentives for precinct captains to steal votes to reap rewards and benefits, including city jobs, no-bid contracts, orders for public works projects in their wards, and even preferential snowplowing during the city’s blasted snowstorms. Patronage is the carrot held by a precinct captain to obtain cooperation from election judges to continue their illegal activities.

Despite the most highly publicized trials and convictions for election fraud in city history, the cases are reminiscent of the consequences that came with reversing the course of the Chicago River, the state’s celebrated public works project of 1900. Then, the city’s sewer and water workers built a giant shipping canal to prevent human, meatpacking, and other industrial wastes from contaminating Lake Michigan. But by sending the effluvia downstate, the “great wonder” also created an opportunity for invasive Asian carp to move freely through the Sanitary and Ship Canal into the Mississippi River to Louisiana. Reversing the river also meant sending huge amounts of pollutants toward St. Louis rather than into Lake Michigan. (This may be why the Cubs vs. Cardinals rivalry endures.) Webb may have exposed many of the tricks used to commit election fraud, but political operatives and patronage-dependent city workers created new channels to keep their bosses in office.

Webb left the US attorney’s office for private practice and founded a watchdog group, Election Watch ’87, to monitor the next round of Chicago elections. The group collected evidence of violations in the February 1987 primary elections for mayor, clerk, and treasurer, and aldermen, in which Harold Washington prevailed over former mayor Jane Byrne, who was attempting a political comeback. Now an outsider, Webb demanded that the current US attorney convene a grand jury to look into the violations that his watchdogs had discovered. He insisted the amount of fraud and irregularities was even greater than when he brought the 1982 cases. During the 1987 election, Webb said, votes were cast by people registered to nonexistent addresses and vacant lots. Other votes were cast by people registered more than once or people who had moved.  But the US attorney was busy prosecuting judges and attorneys from the Cook County Circuit Court accused of corruption.

Richard M. Daley, then the Cook County state’s attorney, was interested in the evidence Webb had collected. In addition, Michael Lavelle, chair of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, joined in, announcing he had information on election fraud that he thought the US attorney should investigate. Lavelle acknowledged that the election board had difficulty removing dead people from voter rolls. He blamed the Cook County Bureau of Vital Statistics saying that the agency was three to four months behind schedule in providing death notices. He blamed the election judges, whom he regarded as unqualified political hacks. “Most of the fraud and irregularity problems being brought to my attention could be stopped or curbed if we had professional judges,” Lavelle said. “The way it stands now, the door is open to allow these abuses to continue.” Yet neither Daley nor Lavelle pursued criminal election fraud investigations.

Board of Elections officials bragged during the 2004 elections that only about 5 percent of the city votes were cast using absentee ballots and that most absentee voters seemed perfectly legal. That seemed true everywhere except the Fourteenth Ward, where Edward Burke followed in the footsteps of his father as Democratic committeeman and then as an alderman for over three decades. There, about 10 percent of ward residents voted absentee. “Maybe a lot of traveling salesmen live in the ward,” suggested one observer. Board of Elections chairman Langdon Neal claimed, “We’ve been able to isolate this problem to a few areas.” Without resources to fully look into the situation, the Board’s investigation method consists of calling about one in twenty absentee applicants to confirm their status.

Also in 2004, three women who participated in a drive to register more Puerto Rican voters in Cook County ran afoul of the law. Rather than going door-to-door to meet potential voters or setting up voter registration tables in public places, the three copied names and addresses from city phone books. The Chicago Board of Elections officials discovered their ruse while checking some of the names and addresses they had submitted. The three were eventually convicted for theft and mutilation of election materials, and sentenced to two years’ probation.

Patronage posts and the “Shakman decrees” designed to rid Chicago politics of the jobs-for-votes schemes that encouraged election fraud, created problems for politicians elected outside the Democratic machine. Mayor Jane Byrne, elected as a reformer in 1979, couldn’t get city workers to plow the streets during blizzards, in part because the sanitation workers weren’t enlisted to participate in her campaign.

Mayor Harold Washington, elected in 1983 as the city’s first black mayor, won the predominantly African American South Side largely on his promise to end patronage. Washington wanted to open up city jobs to blacks and Hispanics who had historically been shut out. But he quickly discovered that a Shakman decree prohibited him from removing some high-ranking city officials who controlled those jobs and were determined to create chaos during his administration, especially in his battles against the city council.

Richard M. Daley, the son of Richard A. Daley, became mayor in 1989, profiting from his father’s Democratic Party machine. His administration quickly found ways to get around the Shakman decrees, building on President Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal policies to shrink government services through privatization. Daley awarded public contracts to his cronies in business who did their own hiring, sometimes simply ignoring the law. But in 2004, after he won his fifth term with 79 percent of the vote, scandal after scandal erupted, eventually forcing him not to seek reelection.

The FBI and US Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald ran multiple investigations during Daley’s final term. Among the scandals the Daley administration was accused of were that truckers were caught paying bribes for city contracts and that white businessmen were found to be setting up front companies to win minority contracts. Noelle Brennan, who was hired to monitor enforcement of the Shakman decrees, acknowledged that the system was easily corrupted. She herself was “concerned about the fact that the Department of Human Resources had no authority, no ability to enforce the rules.”

Plain old vote buying was also rampant, though the payoffs for rounding up votes were jobs and promotions. At the Chicago water department, where Edward “Captain Eddie” Howard had worked in 1982, it was alleged that employees received raises for working on political campaigns.

Fitzgerald ultimately ensnared the leaders of Daley’s city hall patronage operation. Robert Sorich and his aide in the mayor’s Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, Timothy McCarthy, were Daley’s postmasters general. At trial, witnesses testified that on orders from Sorich, blue-collar jobs and promotions for being loyal and effective were distributed to political workers. The jury convicted both men, agreeing that Chicago’s historic “corrupt clout machine” was unlawful. Machine candidates who gave out jobs and promotions to campaign workers were corrupt; they had committed election fraud. “I think what we saw in this case was the revealing of the Chicago machine, the inner workings of the Chicago machine,” said S. Jay Olshansky, the jury foreman. “There clearly is one. It has been in existence for quite some time.”

Olshansky knew Chi-town’s political history well. Mayor Anton Cermak, the founding father of the Chicago machine, liked to say, sure there is criminality, but “only lazy precinct captains steal votes.”

For political observers and operatives alike in Chicago, “corruption” is a relative term. Likewise, modern-day politicians and good-government types call for “reform” when they want power to shift from the other party to their own party. Calls for “reform” are also heard as the city’s many ethnic groups jockey for political power. This was well understood by Progressive Era municipal reformer Colonel Robert McCormick, the longtime editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune. The newspaper remained a forum for debating the “complicated ballet” of corruption and reform. The trials of Mayor Daley provided ample fodder for Ron Grossman, a former history professor turned reporter on Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods, and David Axelrod, a former reporter turned political operative for the Daley campaign.

Not surprisingly, Axelrod defended his boss, expressing doubt about the charges leveled by US Attorney Fitzgerald. Though he said he had always believed in ending political influence over civil service jobs, using the “criminal code to enforce that vision” seemed too harsh a means for removing “politics from government.” Elected officials are expected to use their political influence to help their constituents. Sometimes this can mean “the exchange of favors—consideration for jobs being just one.” Or an alderman or a US senator might agree to support a judicial appointment in exchange for a program in their district. Axelrod, a future advisor to President Barack Obama, suggested that “if deals couldn’t be made” without being accused of a crime, our democratic government would be worse.

Further, if hiring a qualified worker who comes recommended by a politician is treated as evidence of a criminal act, then “only applicants without political involvement are considered,” whatever their qualifications or lack of them. Any political ties a potential servant might have would disqualify him or her from government service. The city would not be assured the benefit of a “better and more responsive” bureaucracy. It certainly would not improve basic services like trash and snow removal. “After a lifetime of observing government and participating in politics,” Axelrod wondered if Fitzgerald’s threat of prison to force reforms “is really desirable.”

Ron Grossman had watched the city’s dance with reform twirl its skirts for decades. Historically, he observed, “The more sagacious reformers realize it’s better to be allied with the cigar-chomping ward heelers than to advertise a good-government campaign as a punch in their faces.” Basic services like garbage pickup and road repairs came through the ward bosses, and voters continue to support their aldermen, pretending “not to notice when office holders and their friends dip into the public trough.” They don’t call this election fraud; indeed it was (literally) “more concrete help than an abstract program of civic reform.”

The good-government types, who back in the old days were Protestants and prohibitionists, were subjected to “a curious kind of name-calling. Along some streets lined with bungalows and two-flats, ‘reformer’ is pronounced with a hint of skepticism and pols, like Edward Burke, the Fourteenth Ward alderman, noted Chicagoans’ suspicions about reformers. There is “an ethnic bias against people who would dictate how other people should lead their lives.” The ethnic lines that divided city voters could be traced to earlier battles over “reform.” It was one thing for a Republican to demand reform, but for a Democrat “to give the impression that you’ve gone over to the silk-hatters after you’ve been raised under a fedora is fatal in politics in Chicago.” But the fedoras were quite accustomed to holding out their hats to elites without fatality. “Land deals and cushy contracts are the common denominator of Chicago’s past and present. That lucrative reality is usually enough to stifle cries for reform from business leaders.”

The truth of that observation was made clear in 2011, when Rahm Emanuel became mayor, and then won again in a run-off campaign in 2015. Both an “ethnic” and a “reformer,” Emanuel figured out how to change city operations to benefit the business leaders who funded his election. Echoing his former boss, President Obama, the mayor proclaimed his administration “a new day in Chicago, wherein hiring at City Hall is all about what you know rather than who you know.” His speechwriter took a few liberties in writing those words. In fact, Emanuel persuaded city hall’s venerable nemesis, the unimpeachable reformer Michael Shakman, who had sued to eliminate political influence in city hiring practices, to endorse the end of federal monitoring.  Federal monitor Noelle Brennan agreed with Shakman that there were enough policies and procedures now in place to end patronage jobs, at least for the greatly reduced number of blue-collar workers the city still employed. Shakman didn’t think patronage was dead and buried, “but it is in a position where it can be controlled, limited and reduced to zero. We are headed in that direction.” Patrick McDonough, a city worker, was less optimistic. “There is still retaliation for people who blow the whistle on corruption.” He didn’t believe it would “ever end.”

A longtime Chicago political campaign operative, “WB,” explained to me in February 2015 that lifting the Shakman decrees wouldn’t affect the ways that political connections influenced the election process. Nor was he convinced that influence was always bad for politics. Shakman and other good-government types are politically naïve, in WB’s opinion. Before the Shakman decrees, a low-skilled person or a “knuckle-headed nephew” could get a union job in the water department through a political patron and work his way into the middle class through promotions and seniority. Now patronage is distributed through outsourced entities and government contractors, who are usually the cronies of the politicians and unaffected by the “reforms.”

Opportunities for corruption may have shrunk for the fedora-wearing civil servants, but not for silk hat–wearing business leaders. Emanuel’s ethnic voting base split during his reelection campaign, forcing him into a runoff in 2015. Corporate funders from in and outside of Chicago, frightened by the support from progressives for Mayor Harold Washington’s protégé Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, poured at least $20.5 million into Emanuel’s coffers. In addition to buying weeks of television and radio ads, the campaign spread “walking-around money” throughout needy neighborhoods, as well as rumors that electing a Latino would be bad for African Americans. Emanuel’s twelve-point margin over Garcia was clearly a matter of money; Chuy didn’t have big money, but with only five million dollars he still won 44 percent of the votes.

Chicago’s experience is much like that of Louisiana in important ways. From Greg Malveaux’s perspective, vote buying and manipulation violates the law and should be punished. Local campaigns and officials see it as just routine and not that harmful, and the voters involved see it as a way to get some economic benefit. Only when stealing taxpayers’ money for personal benefit occurred did the public show real concern, or when, as in St. Martinville, elections disappeared for years. Chicago has exhibited the same pattern. A Republican prosecutor attacked the Democratic political machine, but the violations were punished lightly if at all. The Shakman decrees limited patronage but did not stamp it out; they just redirected it. The people who were targeted by street money wanted and used the money to improve their economic situation in the short run, and the money stimulated turnout optimally. Some electoral fraud is, apparently, a concomitant of democracy.

Excerpted from "Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy" by Dr. Mary Frances Berry  (Beacon Press, 2016). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.


By Mary Frances Berry

Dr. Mary Frances Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the former chairwoman of the US Commission on Civil Rights, the author of 11 books, and the recipient of 35 honorary degrees. Dr. Berry has appeared on "Real Time With Bill Maher," "The Daily Show," "Tavis Smiley," "PBS NewsHour," "CBS Evening News," "Al Jazeera America News" and various MSNBC and CNN shows.

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