Buying Votes
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The good-government types who usually mount their high horses about the influence of money on politics have been suspiciously silent about the four individual guilty pleas and an additional five indictments in federal court in Southern Illinois this week on charges of vote-buying for Senator Kerry in November’s presidential election.
As Mike Fitzgerald and Beth Hunsdorfer of the Belleville, Illinois, News-Democrat reported yesterday, three Democratic committeemen and a precinct worker in East St. Louis, Ill., pleaded guilty on Tuesday, acknowledging that they paid individual voters between $5 and $10 apiece for voting Democratic in the November election. On Wednesday, the U.S. attorney for Southern Illinois, Ronald Tenpas, indicted a city councilman who is chairman of the East St. Louis Democratic Central Committee, Charles Powell Jr., and four East St. Louis city employees. They pleaded not guilty to election fraud charges stemming from the alleged vote buying scheme. One of the city employees, Kelvin Ellis, was already in jail on charges of involvement in a plot to murder a witness to the vote-buying scheme.
There have been barrels of ink spilled recently in this city’s liberal papers over the supposed ethical transgressions of a leading Republican in the House, Tom DeLay, and a Republican lobbyist in Washington, Jack Abramoff. But we’ve seen not a mention in the city’s liberal press so far, nor a peep out of the Pew Charitable Trusts or from Senators McCain or Feingold, about the burgeoning scandal in East St. Louis.
Vote buying became a federal crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a law of which many liberals are justifiably proud. East St. Louis is a predominantly black and poor city. How demeaning is it to a voter of any race to suggest that a vote, instead of something that is an individual’s to decide on the merits, is something that could be sold or bought for $5? As the authors of the Voting Rights Act no doubt recognized, these are the sort of small acts that end up spreading cynicism and undermining the health of a democracy.
