United States Electoral Fraud

Anbinder, Tyler. Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood. New York,
NY: Simon & Schuster.
This book is a general history of New York but provides an overview of the rampant electoral fraud characteristic of the nineteenth century in the city. The Five Points area was particularly notorious. It was an ethnic enclave of recent immigrants who proved to be particularly vulnerable to politicians who wished to use their influence to garner votes and exercise their political patronage. The book chronicles a number of attempts to rein in the voting fraud, as well as the riots associated with election during the Civil War period. Charges of so-called “importing” voters from outside the district were rampant (Anbinder 322). The fact that judgeships were also up for election made New York a ripe source of fraud, given the multiplicity of offices that could be contested, and it was said that no judge would let a ballot box stand between him and obtaining a job (Anbinder 321). Foreign visitors also toured the area because it had become an international curiosity, famous for its corrupt elections, “rampant crime,” and its “squalid tenements” (Anbinder 2). It was said that virtually all jobs were up for either pay or exchanges of political favors, including jobs in the fire department and the state militia.
Campbell, Tracy. Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political
Tradition-1742-2004. New York, NY: Basic Books.
As the title of the book indicates, there has been great pressure to deliver the vote by any means necessary throughout American history, even before America became a nation. American political corruption is not a new phenomenon, although the methods of corruption may have changed throughout different eras of history. This book provides an overview of the changing shape of American electoral fraud. Regarding voter registration fraud, Campbell notes, New York was particularly notorious, given the influence of the Democrats and No-Nothing Party. Rioting in the streets and the need for armed protection was rampant. Many new ethnic groups were associated with the rise of the Democratic Party in New York. While this did provide a source of power for the Irish and other new entrants into American society, it also created neighborhood bastions of corruption, as factions supported corrupt practices as the only way they believed they could gain a voice within the American political system. “More cases of false registrants and plots of false votes,” according to Campbell, were seen in the New York City election of 1905, when Tammany Hall politicians held sway over the city (Campbell 140). Corruption was simply a way of life. In the 1905 election of McClellan versus Hearst, there was even a box of ballots mysteriously discovered while the election was being contested, leading to the two-year court battle that took place while McClellan served as mayor (Campbell 142).
Teorell, Jan & Ziblatt, Daniel. “In Election Fraud and Contested Congressional Elections:
An Analysis of the United States, 1840-1940.” Working paper published by the American Political Science Association (2011). https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228129460_Election_Fraud_and_Contested_Co ngressional_Elections_An_Analysis_of_the_United_States_1840-1940
This article provides an overview of the various reasons elections have been contested in the United States through the legal system. “Drawing on a general ‘calculus of petitions’ that can help untangle when contests might be filed, we seek to evaluate the extent to which the analysis of election disputes is a useful method for measuring the incidence of election fraud” (Teorell and Ziblatt 1). They provide an important contextualization for the trial, which involves false registration of voters in New York. This article examines different techniques of voter fraud, how it was legally prosecuted, and why certain types of fraud were allowed to continue. It also provides an overview for how fraud has changed over a period of a hundred years, the relative effectiveness of various methods used to contain it, and looks ahead to the future to determine how the lessons learned from voter fraud in the United States can be used to assist electoral reforms in the United States and elsewhere. Not all forms of electoral fraud involve false registration, and understanding why this method was particularly useful for New York State may be interesting and valuable to my future research. “Overall, the paper seeks to use the American historical case to contribute to the growing comparative politics literature on the causes of election fraud in newly democratizing countries” (Teorell and Ziblatt 1).