Saturday Story: 27 November 2021

I figured that if I was going to stuff ballot boxes, I better do it with a bit of subtlety. We had three election judges in our camp, out of 18 voting locations. This district still used ancient voting machinery and our judges all knew how to manipulate them without leaving evidence of what they’d done. Our candidate had connections in the area, we were betting that his “reservoir of goodwill” (his words, not mine) would give him enough real votes that our manufactured ones would be enough to put him over the top without arousing suspicions. It wasn’t rocket science; tip the balance just enough and hope that it would result in a margin of victory a bit beyond the threshold of a legally binding automatic recount.

And on Election Day, it all worked as planned, satisfaction guaranteed. Our clearance ended up very tight, but with enough of a cushion that no recount was required.

But the next day couldn’t have been worse. Early on, it became clear that we were in trouble. One of our election judges was found out to have “a jurisdiction liability” by a journalist for the town’s newspaper. Her sweet little bungalow was just on the border of one of our districts. But on the wrong side of the border. There had been a disagreement about the border because of a faulty land survey. The village planning office has done a new survey a week ago and none of us had known about it.

Our win started slipping through our fingers. We could do nothing to protect ourselves; that one voting location’s tally got audited. It turned out that we didn’t know how to hide the evidence of what we’d done as well as we thought we did. The whole scheme unraveled. The revised tally put us back within the threshold for an automatic recount, still ahead but just barely. And when the remaining 17 voting locations were also recounted, our other two stood out like sore thumbs.

The sequence of events that followed did not go well for any of us. The auditors sent their findings up the legal food chain. Our election judges from our three locations each tried to throw the others under the bus. After that, throwing me under the bus was a no-brainer for them.

Now I make license plates.

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