Scandals, State and Local Elections

GIVEN THAT THE high stakes in most elections create incentives to do wrong, the history of state and local election scandals is in large part a history of the law's ineffective or belated attempts to catch up with the ingenuity of humans bent on ensuring victory in elections for the “right” side or issue.

Although election scandals are traditionally downplayed in order to sustain public confidence in the process of elections, the long and detailed history of election scandals tells a story of systemic and regular corruptions of the procedural justice of elections.

The vast majority of elections in the United States are state and local races (and not federal races). Surveying the scene of election scandals in the late 1800s, President Benjamin Harrison provided a candid overview of the status of elections in the United States at that time, certain attributes of which he termed both “depressing and undeniable:”

Many maintain that President Harrison himself, as well as President “Rutherfraud” B. Hayes, were helped to election by virtue of the fraud of sympathetic supporters. Notably, neither President was required to issue instructions to supporters as to what to do, and when to do it, and why, because all of these factors were already known to anyone familiar with the news of the day.

It should to be noted that incumbents create election laws, even though these laws govern the circumstances of their own elections—a classic conflict of interest since procedural integrity is the goal of those elections.

While statements such as Harrison's rarely make it into textbooks, scholarly reviews such as Tracy Campbell's “Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, An American Political Tradition, 1742–2004” provide support for the long history of pressure on elections oftentimes spilling over into fraud, violence, death and scandal. General George Washington himself held liquor “treating” parties where alchohol was provided on Election Day to those willing to ride into town to vote for Washington. Treating parties were subsequently outlawed by the Virginia House of Burgesses.

The history of election scandal goes back even further, for example, in 1675, authorities in a Boston Town-Hall meeting noticed during an election that a man submitted about a dozen ballots with the word “Yea” on them, and he was fined ten pounds for this ballot box stuffing. During the earlier days of viva voce (by voice) voting in the United States, politicians, such as one in Pennsylvania, in 1765, sent out a message that his supporters should put on a “bold face” and that each would be provided “with a good shillelagh [a club or mace]” for election day.

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