The election was (not) rigged!

Fever swampers go from raging to taking credit

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Eric Zorn is a former opinion columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Find a longer bio and contact information here. This issue exceeds in size the maximum length for a standard email. To read the entire issue in your browser, click on the headline link above. Paid subscribers receive each Picayune Plus in their email inbox each Tuesday, are part of our civil and productive commenting community and enjoy the sublime satisfaction of supporting this enterprise.

Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

You read it here first, last Thursday morning, well over a day before the cautious news outlets went with the result Friday afternoon:

It was not a brave prediction at all. In fact it was a bit tardy. Yes, the Democratic primary race for Cook County State’s Attorney between Eileen O’Neill Burke and Clayton Harris III was very close, but barring the discovery of a massive tranche of votes tilting heavily for Harris, there clearly weren’t going to be enough late mail ballots coming in to swing the race in Harris’ favor.

Harris was backed by the Cook County Democratic Party, and those who favored the comparatively conservative Burke were exploding with indignation online insinuating that the delay in tallying all the mail ballots and the peculiar revelation that the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners had discovered more than 10,000 mail-in ballots was a sure sign the fix was in.

“Assuming my forecast holds,” I wrote, “when Burke is finally declared the winner … the wild-eyed crowd will quietly accept the result and pivot to another paranoid notion.”

I was wrong about that. What they pivoted to instead was self-congratulation. In post after post on social media, they insisted it had been their finger pointing, throat clearing and eyebrow raising that had frightened the corrupt elections officials from completing the steal.

This even though neither campaign has expressed lack of confidence in the integrity of the count. Yes, we like to joke about dead people voting in Chicago and shadowy operatives faking thousands of votes, but research tells us that significant vote fraud in the U.S. is vanishingly rare, in part because the risks of getting caught far outweigh the rewards of the extra votes.

The inherent delay in counting mail ballots raises eyebrows in very close elections and undermines general confidence in the process. They’re still accepting ballots that were postmarked on or before Election Day, March 19, but I’ll be surprised if that number exceeds a dozen on Tuesday, deadline day.

Last week I suggested that things would go better if mail ballots had to be postmarked by the Friday before Election Day so that most of them could be counted before the polls closed. But several attentive readers noted that they have to wait until after the polls close because mail ballots submitted by those who voted in person are automatically discarded, so the lists have to be cross-checked.

But a Friday deadline along with rapid-check technology would certainly speed the process and prevent 10-day periods of uncertainty (eight days for Picayune Sentinel readers).

Letters on the election and more topics are just below.

Notes and comments from readers — lightly edited — along with my responses

Vote anxiety

Laurence E Siegel — I do not consider myself a conspiracy nut. But considering the political history of Chicago, I don't question anyone looking sideways at possible shenanigans by those in charge. There are many, many examples. The most famous one was the presidential election of 1960, when Daley had the vote count held up to make sure the whole country had voted, then at the last moment there was a slew of votes for Kennedy, enough to defeat Nixon. Don't put anything past Chicago Democrats.

Zorn — The story that Old Man Daley stole the 1960 election for Democrat John F. Kennedy is quite likely a myth (see Slate’s “Was Nixon Robbed?”) and a 64-year-old myth at that. Not to say that there haven’t been shenanigans, but, as noted above, research tells us that significant vote fraud in the U.S. is vanishingly rare.

Don Nemerov — You were being too tough on calling folks idiots who say the fix was in. The old Chicago joke "My father voted Republican until the day he died, now he votes straight Democrat" wasn't born out of thin air. Plus, given the rampant fraud convictions streaming out of Springfield, mostly of Democratic officials, one can be forgiven for being cynical and not trusting the process. Big issue is mail in voting delay, it needs to be fixed, just adds fuel to the fire now.

Zorn – Old jokes shouldn’t cause you such concern. Nor should anecdotes. If anyone has been detected voting in the name of a dead person in Chicago in the last, oh, say, 44 years (when I arrived in town) I haven’t heard of it. That said, I agree with you about the need to reduce delays.

On changing Columbus Drive to Obama Drive

Rich Warren — A solution that might please everyone is naming Interstate 57 for Obama. We have four other Chicago-area expressways named for former presidents. Not only that, but I-57 starts fairly close to Obama's former stomping grounds. I've never understood why this expressway, which has been there since the 1960s, never received a name.

Zorn— I have seen it referred to as “The Dan Ryan West Leg Extension,” but yeah. Hell yeah.

Peter Zackrison — Italian Americans are leading the fight to keep Christopher Columbus’ name on the drive through Grant Park because they see him as a symbol for their ethnic pride. But Italy did not exist as a nation state until 1861 so the idea that Columbus is “Italian” does not hold water.

If you asked Columbus if he was “Italian”, he would scratch his head and say, “No I am from Genoa.” And he did all his explorations for Spain and wrote about his exploits in Spanish. He lived in Spain or in Spanish colonies (which he founded and claimed for Spain) for the rest of his life.

It does not appear he ever reestablished an identity or relationship with Genoa once he left.

‘Dubiety’ impropriety

I tipped my press fedora to the Tribune Editorial Board last week for slipping the word “dubiety” into a polemic on the election confusion, and invited limerick writers to have a go with the word. Here are some of the results:

Let’s make sure that the votes are all in
Before we determine the win.
Election dubiety
Just breeds impiety,
Which, we all know, is a sin. -- Richard Kieckhefer 

---

The preacher was filled with dubiety
That a salad would provide satiety.
But weight loss was needed
So skimping proceeded.
Now he preaches an ascetic piety. -- D. Dale Walker

---

Trump is a threat to society,
And a source of major anxiety.
When he hawks the Good Book,
It's a terrible look
Amid dubiety about his piety. -- Michael Gorman 

Snark attack

Robert L. Johnson — I so regret you never held public office in Chicago. The current elite make so many unforced errors. Why is that? If you had been mayor, we would already be living in the perfect world designed for us by our betters on the left.

Zorn— Sarcasm does not become you, sir.

A liberal who is not a ‘progressive’

Jake H. — I've always thought of myself as a full-throated liberal in nearly all senses of that word. I still do.

1. I'm an Enlightenment liberal. I believe in a political philosophy grounded in freedom, equality before law, individual rights like free speech, and government for, of, and by the people.

2. I'm an FDR liberal, which is to say, for the retention of capitalism as our basic economic system but amid an enlargement of the concept of freedom to include rights to "freedom from want," "freedom from fear," and the more detailed set of such positive rights outlined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Articles 22-27 – small-s “social security.” This means regulation and redistribution. I do not subscribe to the asinine view, born of a small-minded resentment of taxes as such, that every last legally obtained dollar, whatever its provenance or superfluity, is the holy, inviolate, perpetual possession of its capturer, a principle that would, if logically followed, doom civilization and thus all dollar-producing activity to start with. I have respect for the conservative intellectual tradition, but I harbor the suspicion that it lacks much deep content other than to say "stop." When they mean, stop and think, I'm all for it. In practice, however, it seems to mean something more like deny people health care for no good reason.

3. I'm a civil rights and civil liberties liberal, which is in large part merely a thorough and honest vindication of (1) but also, through anti-discrimination law and cultural norms that don't apply only to the government but to private parties in their public interactions as well, a commitment to a broader anti-caste principle. Women and minority groups should not experience life as one of second-class status on the basis of identity characteristics that may be personally important but are in most social and political contexts, superficial and irrelevant.

For all these reasons, I think of myself as a liberal, not a "moderate," whatever that is. (It sounds suspiciously like nothing much.) I have come to reject in recent years, however, another label, one with an honorable reformist tradition but which I think has revealed illiberal and/or cuckoo bananas tendencies, and that label is "progressive."

In 2018, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz wrote “Fighting Words: No, ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ aren’t synonyms. They have completely different histories and the differences matter.”

To Wilentz, progressivism signals an excessive hostility to capitalism and an excessive focus on identity. As he puts it, “Progressives kindle to an America where this sort of identity—or, currently, the intersectionality of several identities—defines both individuals and social relations, where the differences between groups of citizens are regarded as more significant than the similarities. ... Liberals prefer that social equality and civil rights be fixed in universal principles of justice and human rights, distinct from racial, ethnic, and gender identities. ... In [] correcting for generations of violent injustice and the burden of race, the ultimate goal would be what [MLK] and others described as a beloved community, an America in which differences abound but are also offset by human and civic interconnection and finally rendered insignificant in public life."

In short, I associate progressivism with a misguided wokeness that is both wrong, in all senses of wrong, and counterproductive – this shit’s getting actual bad guys elected.

Joanie Wimmer (responding to Jake H. — In your paragraphs 1, 2, and 3 I thought you were describing me! But then we diverged somewhat. I think the idea that we can end racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia if we would only stop talking about race, patriarchy, sexual orientation, and gender identity is a foolish belief. I say that, in part, based on my personal experience, and, in part, based on Illinois pattern jury instructions which I use in my work.

I never was an intellectual racist, which is to say that I never, in the executive function part of my brain, believed that darker skinned people were inferior, intellectually or in any other way. The executive function portion of my brain always recognized equality of the races, and the sexes. But there is a portion of our minds, our opinions, our feelings, which is not totally guided by logic and which reflects the cultural mores of the world in which we grew up.

And I grew up where African-Americans in the movies were either mammies, Pullman porters, or step-and-fetch-its. Many people, who will tell you that they don’t have a racist bone in their body, will shift their purses and hold onto them tighter when they see an African-American male approaching. I’ve found myself doing that. In interviewing people for jobs, I have a tendency to relate better to people who are like me. I think all people, not just me, are guided in part, not just by their logic, not just by the executive function part of their brain, but by their feelings, what I tell my therapist is the reptilian part of my consciousness/subconsciousness.

The prejudices of the culture in which we grow up influences that reptilian part, influences our feelings and expectations that are not filtered through our thoughts. That is why I think the idea of anti-racism makes sense. And it’s why I think ignoring race, etc. will not end racism. One has to be aware of one’s subconscious expectations and prejudices in order to stop the reptilian part of our feelings from affecting one’s actions.

I get angry watching Bill Maher and other white men tell me that everything will be all right if we just stop thinking about race, gender, etc. That is mansplaining on steroids. They are not the ones whose oxen are getting gored by the racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in our society. They are not the ones being passed up for jobs, credit, housing, etc. The speech given by America Ferrara in Barbie had to be given for a reason. We will not end racism and the other isms if we just ignore race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

Jake H. (responding to Joanie Wimmer) --  I don't think that we should ignore identity differences. I think we should strive for a world where they don't confer significant social disadvantages, where they don't matter in that sense. To the extent they do -- as in the classic and ongoing case where resumes with Black-sounding names result in fewer callbacks than those with non-Black-sounding names -- that's simply unfair and unjust, whatever the conscious motivation of the person making those calls. It certainly violates 3. I would heartily endorse government action, more than we do now probably -- sting operations, deep investigations -- to root out such unfairness. For all I know, we have enough existing law to do that. I'm all for your jury instruction to alert people to their natural potential to reach biased conclusions based on identity characteristics.

It's possible to have a society that *pretends* that racial and other identity characteristics don't confer any disadvantages and that makes a fetish of "ignoring race." The French sometimes do this, as where, if I understand correctly, they prohibit the government from even keeping race-based statistics. That's crazy. As you say, you can't fix such problems if you simply refuse to see them. I certainly couldn't be a 3-type liberal if I shared that view, and I don't. I don't think Wilentz does either. I don't think Coleman Hughes, whose recent book advocates "colorblindness," does either.

So, where's our difference? Do we have one? Maybe. My beef is with the newish progressive way of talking about identity issues, which holds:

- Any statistical "underrepresentation" of POCs in anything anywhere is ipso facto racist.

- We should engage in racial essentialism -- Black people are like x, white people are like y -- to reveal the depth of the disadvantage imposed by a white dominant culture. (In other words, SATs don't test reading and math, as you might suppose, but whiteness.)

- We should see society as characterized by a more-or-less permanent racial power struggle.

- We should understand global affairs as one of white colonialists vs. oppressed brown people.

- Children should understand themselves as racial beings, carrying either the privilege of whiteness or the stamp of oppression.

- Liberalism (all types) and free speech especially are shams, used to perpetuate white supremacy.

- Merit, excellence in anything, is a sham; merit is just another word for whiteness and is thus a tool of white supremacy.

- Progress is a sham; any so-called progress only ever happens because white people have an ulterior motive.

- Racism manifests itself powerfully and constantly through a daily stream of micro-aggressions.

- Criminal justice is not merely a frequently imperfect system that demands constant vigilance to ensure fairness and the rights of the accused but rather fundamentally, at its core, a system of race-based oppression.

- American history is nothing more than a giant unholy crime scene.

- The cure for racism is not robust enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, as I suggested, but rather Orwellian struggle sessions among the most progressive people on earth where they can navel-gaze, journal, and confess their privilege.

- The above is an orthodoxy and litmus test for employment and acceptability generally, and dissenters, even those expressing views held by a vast majority of Americans, should be "canceled" -- fired, doxxed, shouted down, threatened, etc.

I could go on. The gist is a cartoonish, vastly overstated view of identity relations in a pluralistic society that was really shocking to me when I first encountered it (in my training and subsequent "race work" as a high school teacher). It has precious little to do with anything "liberal," in my view.

Like most intellectual traditions, this way of thinking has a point or two. The original concept of "intersectionality," for example, stood for what strikes me as the non-controversial point that people can experience discrimination on the basis of a confluence of identity characteristics, e.g., as a "Black woman," and it's no defense to such a claim that one hires plenty of white women on the one hand and plenty of Black men on the other. There are few better examples, I think, of "systemic racism" than the contrast between society's reactions to two drug problems -- the crack epidemic of the 80s and the opioid epidemic of now. The former, affecting Blacks, was met with "just say no" and "lock 'em up." The latter, affecting whites, was met with "get the poor folks the help they need."

As I've said before, I'm open to good arguments. But I detect in progressive circles today a startling impatience with argument and an increasingly shrill and anti-intellectual attitude that, as Reagan said about the Democratic Party, has left me. I think this sort of progressivism is a huge mistake, both on its merits and politically as well because it alienates people of good will and, really unforgivably, allows the likes of Christopher Rufo to be right some of the time.

This exchange continued for several more rounds here.

Sorry, guys, the 7th best whistler in the world is now officially spoken for

We spent the weekend in Los Angeles attending the wedding of our niece, pop singer Cassandra Violet, to animator Pedro Eboli. We didn’t cry loudly during the proceedings though it would have been fitting payback since she shrieked through most of our wedding back when she was not yet nine months old.

Her seventh place finish in the 2020 Global Whistling Championship was duly noted during the ceremony by the grateful groom.

Ya gotta see these tweets!

We have reached the semi-final round of Visual Tweet Madness, ‘24, by bracket-ish tournament to select the funniest tweet that relies on imagery of the last 12 months.

The top two finishers in each of these rounds will be in Thursday’s Final Four along with the Final Four winners from the quarterfinal round of conventional Tweet Madness in which there is still time to vote.

SEMIFINAL ROUND ONE

SEMIFINAL ROUND TWO

Vote for your favorite. I’ll post the Final Four in Thursday’s main edition along with the winners of

Usage note: To me, “tweet” has become a generic term for a short post on social media.

There’s still time to vote in the conventional Tweet bracket tournament

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