THE SCRAPBOOK thinks it knows why poor Bill Daley shows such distress over those voters who "miscast" their ballots in Palm Beach. Cook County, Illinois, where Daley was raised, had a long tradition of "four-legged voting." This is a technique perfected by employees of Daley's late father, who was himself once active in Cook County politics. In four-legged voting, a polling official will physically walk an aged, infirm, confused, or merely reluctant voter into the voting booth to ensure that the vote is correctly cast -- or, as Bill Daley might put it, that no "irregularities" occur. In fact, during the tenure of Daley's father, so few irregularities occurred that many precincts routinely reported Democratic vote percentages topping 95 percent. Now that's regular!
The irony that Bill Daley is overseeing Al Gore's continuing campaign has not, it seems to us, been sufficiently remarked. Daley continues to insist, as a loyal son should, that his father was a great man, but it's useful to recall in what precisely the Daley greatness consisted.
The new biography of Richard J. Daley, American Pharaoh, offers an interesting summary of the routinized fraud that Daley's machine imposed on his Chicago fiefdom for two decades. "Voting fraud began on registration day," the biographers write. Transient hotels were canvassed for names that could be used as "voters." Graveyards were canvassed, too, of course. Election judges were bribed, when bribes were necessary. Republican poll watchers who asked too many questions were detained by police. Goons were hired to threaten goody-goodies and rough up malcontents. And so on -- all this and more was documented in the Chicago Tribune's famous 1972 expose of local vote fraud, and most of these tricks were used in presidential campaigns, too, including in 1960.
Nowadays, of course, voting in Chicago as elsewhere is a much more antiseptic exercise, and these "irregularities" are considered merely quaint in retrospect; sophisticates are supposed to remember the Daley era with fondness. And remember it we should, especially when Bill Daley calls the suddenly famous "butterfly ballots" an "injustice unparalleled in our history," as he did last week. That Richard J. Daley's youngest son and most talented protege can say such a thing with a straight face is perhaps a testament to how far we've come -- or, more likely, to how far Bill Daley will go.