Let the Vote Tampering Commence
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.

For the last two weeks, we’ve heard much clamoring about the possibility of vote tampering today, Election Day.
The Democrats, still smarting from 2000, are accusing the Republicans of trying to shut out minority voters through intimidation, feigned incompetence, and frivolous challenges.
The Republicans say the Democrats are planning to stuff the ballot boxes with votes from the illegally registered, the mentally incompetent, and – shock, shock – the dead.
Everyone is checking everyone else out, claiming vast conspiracies and whining before even a single vote is counted.
Makes you pine for the good old days when cheating was greeted with a wink and a nod and everyone figured that because both sides were doing it, it would even out in the end.
An oft-told story in New Jersey dates back to the late 1940s or early 1950s, when three men ruled the state Democratic machine: Dennis Carey of Newark; Frank “I Am the Law” Hague of Jersey City, and David Wilentz of Perth Amboy.
Carey ruled Essex County with a fierce grip and was instrumental in changing it, through patronage, to a heavily Democratic stronghold from a largely Republican area. He was still going strong in 1960, stumping for John F. Kennedy.
Hague was an eight-term Jersey City mayor who ruled through intimidation, bribery, and patronage for the extremely loyal. He wasn’t above using wiretaps to get dirt on his enemies, and he started the kickback system whereby Hudson County workers had to “contribute” a small percentage of their paychecks if they wanted to keep their public jobs.
Wilentz made his bones as New Jersey’s attorney general, prosecuting Bruno Hauptmann in the Lindbergh baby case, but ran Middlesex County and its traditional Democratic bastions of Perth Amboy and New Brunswick. Unlike the other two, he was largely a backstage player, finding jobs for loyalists and their relatives and selecting judges.
His son, Robert, ended up as chief justice of the state’s Supreme Court, though it must be said he was eminently qualified and deserving regardless of his breeding line.
As told by someone who swore he witnessed it, the story goes that one year an election in Middlesex County was running unusually close. Wilentz supposedly turned to his old pal Hague for help.
“Truckloads of people from Jersey City came in,” the witness said. “I think everyone in Alpine Cemetery [a big graveyard in Perth Amboy] voted that day.”
Another oft-told yarn in Middlesex is that regular Democratic poll workers were urged – that’s putting it mildly – to unilaterally register everyone they knew, including illegal aliens and convicts still in jail: It wouldn’t be too hard to find someone to pull the lever for them.
One of the most lovable rogues in politics in New Jersey – or anywhere else, for that matter – is Billy Musto, who was a longtime state senator and was re-elected mayor of Union City in 1982 even though he had just been convicted in a kickback scheme and sentenced to seven years in federal prison.
Mr. Musto had such control over politics in Union City that he never had to worry about stuffing the ballot box. He dealt with uncertainty in other ways.
A few years before the 1982 election, when Mr. Musto was under indictment in another federal case, a reporter asked if he was worried about his chances in that year’s election.
“Nah,” he snorted. “I got five guys running against me and I put three of them up myself to split the [Hispanic] vote.”
New Jersey doesn’t corner the market on such shenanigans, of course. Every time there’s a big election in New York City, the newspapers are full of tales of frail or mentally ill people being wheeled out of nursing home and psychiatric centers and driven to the polls to vote, usually for Democrats. You can bet this year will be no different.
And there’s the ancient tale of an upstate Republican politician who once boasted, in song, of his prowess at getting out the vote because of his amazing ability to “vote both the dead and the alive, alive-o.”
The Florida fiasco of 2000 is still fresh in most minds, but people of a certain age remember the 1960 presidential election, which wasn’t decided until the next day – and only after Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley (the father, not the son), sat on the Cook County returns until it was clear how big a margin would be needed for Kennedy to carry Illinois.
So, get out the popcorn, settle down for a long night in front of the TV set, and listen closely for details of that great American sport: stealing an election.