This is a horror story and ought to have been posted on Halloween.

Once upon a time there was a country split in two. In one part of the country slavery formed the basis of the economy. In both parts of the country most women had only a few more rights than the slaves did.

In the fullness of time, the country was torn apart by a civil war over slavery. In the end slavery was abolished. Former slaves were granted full rights of citizenship, including the right to vote—at least if they were men. If they were women, they still couldn’t vote. It took 60 years before the white, black, and other sorts of men “gave” the right to vote to women.

In that civil war and the subsequent fight for women’s suffrage, many people died or shed blood or went to jail over the right to vote. For example, for the crime of advocating a woman’s right to vote, a young woman named Alice Paul was sent to jail. All she had done wrong was exercise her First Amendment right to express a contrarian opinion about something. In jail she continued to disagree with “the majority” by refusing to eat. So her jailors rammed a thick, rubber hose down her throat and poured food into her stomach through it. (FYI: For better or worse, Alice Paul invented hunger strikes.)

Young people, I suspect, haven’t heard these stories before. It’s as if people younger than I am—of which their are multitudes—have never heard of a time when black men and all women couldn’t vote.

Flash-forward: 2010 Cook County, IL

The bad old days are over now. Now anyone can vote as often as he or she likes in Cook County, IL, home of Chicago and of me, too. You can be dead and vote here. You can be a citizen of a foreign country and vote here.

No one cares, though, because no one thinks an individual vote is worth anything anymore. The only people who aren’t welcomed at the polls in Cook County are people who want to cast votes for the wrong people. Contrariness is illegal here:

• If a neighborhood tends to vote contrarily, the county sheriff loads all its ballots into the back of a pickup truck and then lets them fall off before the truck reaches the county offices. Yup, that’s right, the votes are conveniently lost, and, yup, that’s my neighborhood.
• If the county commissioner for a contrarian neighborhood like mine decides to make a stink about the lost ballots, or has the audacity to run for county board president, then a car filled with thugs drives through his neighborhood and tries to spray his house with bullets; unfortunately, the thugs are stupid and shoot up the wrong house (but oddly enough no one is ever arrested).
• After making so much trouble, if the county commissioner has the gall to run for reelection, by a strange coincidence he’s caught tearing down his opponent’s signs, and he gets himself arrested.

Unbelievable, You Say?

On Saturday, just two days before the election in which he is running for reelection, Cook County commissioner Tony Peraica was arrested. Fox News posted his mug shot. Please take a look at it and read the story. After you’ve read the story, please return to this post, especially if you don’t live in Cook County, because the Fox story isn’t exactly perfectly clear.

Sidebar: I know Fox News is supposedly a Republican propaganda machine, and you may wonder why I’ve referred to it. Well, it’s because I was watching a football game yesterday on the local Fox broadcast channel (the only channel broadcasting the game), and right in the middle of all the expensive political advertisements, Fox inserted a full-screen graphic of the mug shot. The voice-over said, “Republican candidate for Cook County Commissioner, Tony Peraica, has been arrested for tearing down his opponent’s campaign signs.”

Here’s what seems to have happened:

The commissioner was riding in a van that had the misfortune to be driving through McCook, IL, which is in his district. McCook is an industrial area with less than 300 mainly-white residents (I’d estimate less than 100 voters), and its mayor is running against the commissioner in the coming election.

Sidebar: I don’t live in McCook, but I do live in the district. The McCook mayor has been flooding my mailbox with campaign literature accusing the commissioner of being the force behind Cook County’s outrageously high taxes (they’re so high even Chicago Mayor Daly complains about them). Every voter in my neighborhood knows this is an outright lie. In fact the commissioner at times was the only commissioner on the board to vote against tax hikes.

A patrol officer (possibly a sheriff’s deputy, possibly a “city” of McCook cop) pulled the van over for unknown reasons (apparently not a traffic violation, because the van’s driver wasn’t arrested, not even as the driver of “the getaway car”). Immediately thereafter a McCook police sergeant “showed up” to arrest the commissioner for criminal vandalism. The police, supposedly, had just received a complaint from a McCook citizen who lives over a restaurant and happened to look out of his window: only moments earlier the citizen had spotted the commissioner vandalizing some of the mayor’s personal property, i.e., political advertising signs.

Now, maybe the complaint sounds plausible to you, because “everybody knows how corrupt Cook County politicians are,” and Tony Peraica is a Cook County politician, after all. But his biography suggests he might not be as corrupt as his colleagues: Born in Croatia in 1957, he was orphaned at age 11 and immigrated to the U.S. alone at age 13 to live with relatives in Chicago. He grew up to become an attorney, who’s likely to know it’s illegal to tear down your opponent’s campaign signs.

Abuse of Power

After he got out of jail, Peraica called the incident an abuse of police power. That’s an understatement, IMHO. It’s an abuse of the office of mayor, an abuse of the power of the dominant political party in Cook County, an abuse of election law, an abuse of all kinds of power. 

What I want to know is: is there a judge in Cook County who has the integrity to throw the charges out of court? Does the county state’s attorney have the courage to indict the McCook mayor and the police involved for corruption, and does the federal attorney have the integrity to charge the scoundrels with RICO and civil rights violations?

Sidebar: Speaking of corruption in Cook County politics, how did the mayor of a town with less than 100 voters win the Democratic nomination for commissioner of a district that has at least 100,000 voters, many of whom are good Democrats? It isn’t as if McCook is a Democratic enclave in an otherwise all-Republican district.

Vote against Political “Machines”

Wake up, young people. You must vote. Millions of people have died for the right to vote--since democracy was invented in Greece more than two millennia ago. Millions.

You should care when dead people vote, even when they elect your favorite candidates, because the next time they could elect another Hitler. You should care when citizens of other countries vote here, because the next time they could elect someone who will sell our country’s interests out to another country. You don’t cast merely a single vote: with only a limited number of candidates on any ballot, your vote can’t possibly be the only vote your candidate will get. And if you really can’t find a single candidate on a ballot with an iota integrity, then you need to run for office yourself.