Translation of excerpts from Robert Heinlein’s book, Take Your Government Back - part 26

How to work as an observer at the elections

Election voices you collected on election day may disappear without a trace on the night after the election. One of the favorite methods of voting fraud is to use the fact that, after voting for the main party candidate, many voters forget to mark their choice regarding candidates for other government posts . And if in the bulletin the candidates from different parties are grouped by the posts for which they are running, then after the voting is closed, it is very easy to put the missing marks in front of the necessary candidates. For example, if a governor and a congressman are chosen, then having 300 ballots, of which the vote for the congressman is only 250, for 5 minutes of working behind closed doors it is very easy to convert the election results from a ratio of 110 votes to the candidate Dvosmyslin and 140 to the candidate The Seminary - in the ratio: 160 votes - for the candidate Doubtuslin and 140 - for the candidate Dobroporyadin, leaving no trace of the fraud.

More often, ballots with candidates grouped by party lists are juggled by simply throwing out partially marked ballots as incorrectly filled in - if they indicate an undesirable candidate in them - and leaving them if the right candidate is indicated in them, ignoring any admitted bulletin error.

Direct stuffing of false ballots in the ballot box is very rare. Voter bribery is even more rare, examples of elections, the result of which was rigged by such methods, can be found, perhaps, in the archives.

These brutal and grossly dishonest methods are not used by successful professional politicians, even if their organization is corrupt through and through. They use other, more efficient, reliable (and relatively honest) methods characteristic of professional politics. If these professionals resort to gross forgery, then their organization is heading for the abyss. Remember the criminal cases of election fraud in Kansas.

Of course, an observer at a polling station cannot personally verify the counting of votes, because several people are simultaneously engaged in counting, and it is impossible for the observer to keep track of everyone. However, the presence of an observer officially registered by the precinct election commission is almost one hundred percent protection against attempts to vote fraud. In addition to creating the appearance of careful observation of the counting, the observer should count how many ballots are rejected as spoiled and for what reason, because they can greatly influence the outcome of those elections where the share of the votes of the rivals is not very different.

When using voting machines, the above procedure becomes unnecessary. But then other, more subtle methods of fraud, which have nothing to do with rude methods of coercion or bribing voters, become possible. What one engineer designed could be corrected by another engineer, so that the voting machine showed incorrect results. And in such a situation, your observer will not be able to do anything. Detecting traces of interference with the internal structure of these machines will require a full investigation, which the FBI is likely to be on the shoulder, but your supervisor will not.

At the end of the counting of votes, the observer reports the results to the headquarters by telephone, where, according to incoming information, you and the candidate are nervous and finishing their fingernails for excitement, counting the total number of votes. The observer after the telephone report may go to the post-election party.

Post election party

When all polling stations are closed, you move from headquarters to the hall where the agitators club meetings usually take place. This time, three times more people will come here than are listed in the Club of Agitators, but you are ready for this, let them come, this will only be more fun.

You did not even have time to eat dinner, and your stomach is cramped up by hunger. All you would like to do now is grab a sandwich on the go. At this time, your candidate returns from a detour to the polling stations, and you two, once, without the crowd of supporters around you, except maybe the secretaries of your headquarters and a couple more people, are getting ready for the party. You leave someone at the phone, instructing him to receive calls from observers and record the vote count. Turn on the radio and catch your favorite radio station, which is already starting to transmit preliminary election results in the main constituencies. In the hall, you put a large school board, instructing one of the employees to write down preliminary results on it so that everyone can see them. Now you switch to organizing a banquet.

The Club of Agitators consists of 100 people, but three times more will come to the party - 300 people, each of whom, on average, is enough for a liter of beer. Therefore, you stocked 300 liters of beer. This is a lot, and you bought beer with whole barrels, unless of course you were able to arrange for your supporters to supply you with them for free. And of course, you agreed with the seller that you would get money back for unused kegs, so you put one keg into the hall, keeping the rest in a locked room. You also remember to stock up on 500 disposable paper cups.

For those who do not drink alcohol, you have coffee and lemonade. There is also a small amount of snacks in the stock, like donuts, cheese, and crackers, which you do not post until it is one o'clock in the morning.

You do not need to serve spirits, your budget will not tolerate this. But some visitors will bring them anyway, and get drunk. Do not hinder them, we have a free country.

Visitors begin to gather, taking you and Mr. Chestnyagu out of the prostration you have fallen since the voting ended. They gather around the candidate, shake his hand, clap him on the shoulder, and want to drink with him. Some of the visitors coming to you.

After these first swallows, the people begin to throw the shaft, the hall quickly filled. Most of the visitors are your friends, but there are hardened party-goers who attend each post-election party of each party. You hid behind the table so that the journalists did not bother you, and eat a sandwich, washing it down with coffee, listening to the phone with one ear, and at the same time trying not to miss the progress of updating the preliminary results recorded by the receiver of the calls. At the same time, you are listening to the radio, which reports that Judge Luzhaykin has an impressive margin in the votes for his nomination for a candidate for the governor’s post. This news gives you joy - having Luzhaykin at the head of the party list will make it easier for you to win the main election.

The first telephone reports on the results of the counting of votes began to arrive, which are not very happy for you. The sandwich you eat is eager to roll back to your throat. Chestnyaga rushes through the crowd, smiling and throwing cues around, bends down to you, glances at the preliminary results. His face becomes anxious, but he claps you on the shoulder encouragingly, “Don't be upset,” he says, “All this is worth it to survive, even if we lose. If ever I run again, I want you to be in charge of my campaign. ” This phrase touches you to tears, but you are fastening: there are too many outsiders around.

After some time, the results begin to change: there is a preponderance towards Chestnyagi. Chestnyagi has 982 votes, Hope has 1005. Chestnyaga-2107, Hope-2043. You are ahead! Chestnyaga-5480, Nadezhda-5106, you are restoring your confused breathing. Chestnyaga-9817, Hope-8166. Chestnyaga 12042, Nadezhda ... wait a minute, it seems you hear the number of your constituency on the radio, and immediately the telephone starts ringing.

"Silence! Be quiet, please! ”The ambient speaker goes silent, at least in the immediate vicinity of the radio, from which the announcer cheerfully broadcasts:“ The election results in the districts were determined. Candidate for nomination to Congress from the Democratic Party in the Tridentary District, Jack Hope, by the results of the vote gave the Honorable Jonathan Chestnyage - as the campaign manager told us, urging everyone to support this candidate in the fall. Unfortunately, we could not reach Mr. Chestnyagi, but it’s already clear that ... ”You don’t hear the rest. You won!!!

You spend the rest of the evening with a lightened heart. You stop tracking news on the radio, walk around the room and communicate, although your legs just fall off from fatigue. You pour yourself a glass of beer, but then you leave it to foam and dry out, because the election of the prosecutor general took an unexpected turn. It seems that in the future this may cause difficulties. At about three in the morning, you are with a new party candidate for congressional elections, and a pair of proxies, squeeze into the front desk around the clock, and order the most abundant meal of those who have eaten in the last two weeks. You already have the preliminary results of the elections in your hands, you read them out loud ... At 4 o'clock in the morning you finally get to your bed and fall asleep in a dead sleep

"Debriefing" after the election

Chestnyaga-16107, Nadezhda-11373

So, you set a record: all the previous elections in your district showed that when two candidates are running, one of them can get a maximum of 10,000 votes if they run their campaign "perfectly." Comparing the number of voters with previous elections in your district and with other districts shows that this time in your district, there were 2,000 more voters than usual. Thus, the methods by which your campaign was conducted were able to collect 6,000 votes more than the record of the previous elections you beat, and you received 2,000 votes of those voters who did not go to the primaries, which convincingly confirms the correctness of your campaign methods. This is not the case when you win only due to the shortcomings of the campaign of a competing candidate, and not due to the superiority of your campaign. A detailed study of the results at the polling stations showed that your candidate personally collected between one-third and one-fourth of the outweighing votes, the rest were collected by the agitators. So, your decision to send Chestnyag himself to bypass the voters' houses was correct.

The campaign fund is empty, but all bills are paid. Almost everything - there are still bills for beer, you paid for it from your own pocket. Do not forget to return the untouched two kegs - this will help you reduce your losses. In addition, in the wake of the victorious euphoria, you will surely be able to persuade a couple of colleagues to share with you the shortage in your budget. Chestnyaga promised to reimburse your expenses, but you will not catch him with the word - he himself spent more than he was going to.

We cheated !!!

Rather, you did not win. Suppose something was wrong with you, or maybe a split occurred among your supporters, and you finished with the following layout: Chestnyaga-12785, Nadezhda-12009.

In such a situation it is very easy to start shouting about vote rigging, blaming everything on the political mafia, using dirty political methods, and stuffing in forged ballots. Most likely, you will be wrong, and the elections are not lost for these reasons, and not because you didn’t have enough supporters, or because your agitators didn’t work hard enough. In any election there is a high percentage of voters who did not vote. At the primaries of such voters more than 50%. And you cannot blame them for rigging election results. Of course, it may be that you did everything you could, but the outcome of the elections was really influenced by some dirty tricks used at polling stations, or somewhere else. However, even in this situation, the election results still reflect the will of the American people, expressed by the voters - even by non-attendance at the elections. Get over it.

Rallied the party ranks

For now, do not perplex your agitators with work, at least until the next meeting of the club of agitators. Until then, you have a lot to do.

First, you need to collect the lists of voters who have voted so that in the next campaign you don’t need to get them from local authorities by hook or by crook. Some of the commanders of agitator detachments may be disciplined enough to help you with this, but most will dynamite you for so long that the records of those who have voted will go to the archive. Therefore, it is better to do everything yourself. Voter lists are very convenient to re-shoot with an ordinary camera. But copying lists for the whole district is too much work for one person, even with a camera. So copy everything you can, and when you need the other lists, get them from the officials. Take into account copied lists in a notebook, so as not to do double work.

Understand this matter quickly, so that after the State Party Committee holds a meeting of candidates for the primaries, you and your candidate can go to rest for at least a week before the start of the final election campaign. Ideally, it would be nice to rest for a few days right after the primaries. But most likely, before you decide to leave, you will need to take up the consolidation of your victory, consolidating the party organizations of your district. Because after the election, a number of members of your Club of Agitators are elected to the district party committee, and you are among them. So now you control the composition of the district delegation at the party congress. Mr. Chestnyag after his victory in the primaries automatically becomes a temporary member of the state party committee, and a delegate to the state party congress. In consultation with you, he compiled a list of members of the state party committee, including you there. Now you can attend meetings of the party committee held in the state capital, but you may not have time for this, because you have to do so much. (In your staff, there may be others in the party organization, but what I describe is typical actions of the party organizations after the elections. You need to be ready to participate in such events, in whatever order they may take, and to work in them, tirelessly, even if less than your people got into the state and regional party committees than you need to control the political life of the district).

However, your first task should be to establish contact with your former rival - Jack Nadezhda, if, of course, he is a full-fledged member of your party, and not a puppet sent by a rival party. In the final election you will need his support. Contact him, or his manager, invite them both to visit you for lunch.

Do not forget to call Mr. Chestnyagu. After lunch, you will discuss your joint actions in a future election campaign. Do not offer them any deals, and do not mean that they will support you in exchange for something. Take for granted that your former rival in the primaries and his manager will support the entire list of party candidates, including, of course, Mr. Chestnyagu. Which, by the way, will offer Hope to be the chairman of the district committee of the party campaign, explaining at the same time that his work in this post will be as intensive as he wants. After all, in essence, this post is exclusively nominal, since you yourself will be the executive director of the committee and the actual manager of its work. In addition, you will continue to work as Mr. Chestnyagi’s campaign manager, and, being at the same time the chairman of the party delegation from your district, you will be responsible for all party activities in the district. But Jack Hope you do not say all this. You only offer him, in exchange for his nominal support, to occupy a nominal post of the highest level in your district. You are offering his manager the post of vice chairman of the same district committee and membership in the executive board of your election campaign. They may agree, vigorously take up work, and bring you much benefit, or, with a skeptical chuckle, will politely leave to "consider the proposal." Or in exchange for their support, directly demand money or guarantees of appointment to a government post, or both. They could have remained debts from the just past campaign, which must be paid. Or they just want to make a lot of money working on your campaign.

Your former contender may want to be able to distribute a significant proportion of government posts, or want you to help him fulfill the promise made to his manager by placing him on the secretarial post in Congress if Chestnyag wins the election. For some mysterious reasons, many candidates who lost elections seem to believe that their more successful rivals are simply obliged to help them pay off the debts left from the campaign and assist them in fulfilling their promises made during the campaign. This is something like blackmail, do not fall for it.

In this case, your candidate must explain to them that he cannot promise posts in the government to anyone who demands them, and that he constantly refuses to make such promises even to his own associates. And he will deal with appointments to posts only after the elections, if, of course, he wins them. As for financial assistance, he simply has no money.

Hearing all this, your former rivals may clumsily back down, especially if they have no other choice, and preferring to retain a rather high position in the party hierarchy. Or, they may reject your offer and proudly leave. Do not blame them, they did not do so because of their depravity. Your refusal to pay on debts made by them in an attempt to defeat you in the primaries, for some reason, may seem to them a monstrously unfair act towards them.

In this case, attract yourself to the aid of heavy artillery. Let someone from the Big Cones of your party, preferably from the entourage of the party's candidate for governor, contact Jack Nadezhda, and politely but firmly explain to him that if he wants to keep some political weight in the party, then he should behave correctly - provide your name in support of Chestnyagi’s political campaign, call on their supporters to support the winning candidate, and participate in at least one or two public meetings for candidates from the party list, including Mr. Chestnyagu. Perhaps after this you will get the support of your former rival. Only in no case do not buy this support: it is not worth it.

Being engaged in all this, at the same time make sure that each of those who participated in your campaign received a personal letter from you with gratitude for support. Letters can be printed on the machine gun. Let those who directly bypass voters get letters that are different from the standard text: try to express your deepest appreciation in them. Let the text of the letter simultaneously contain the call to the agitators for a new battle - the final campaign. In addition, at the next meeting of the Club of Agitators, arrange a celebration ceremony for them: thank everyone personally, emphasizing the exceptional contribution that he made to the victory in the primaries.

Begin spending party dinner parties, which I wrote about above. In the future, the work of rallying the party ranks will pay off handsomely. At the invited breakfast invite everyone you can. Indeed, in addition to the group of supporters of Mr. Nadezhda, there are at least twenty other party factions in the district — one for each candidate for each elective post. And you will need the support of all of them. So invite each of the losing primaries to the candidates personally for breakfast by phone, in addition to the traditional invitation sent by mail. Party breakfasts will help you settle a lot of differences, reconcile many party leaders. And it will be much easier than to win Jack Hope to your side, because here you act as a mediator in settling the interests of many groups. The main thing for which you are doing all this is the creation of a single election committee for the candidates of the party list. This is the best way to ensure that your candidate wins the election. You turn your plans into the actions of the people around you, helping them to "save face" and strengthen their authority in the party, nobly speaking publicly in support of their former rivals in the primaries - candidates from the party list. With fanfare and fanfare, hand out nominal positions in the campaign committee to each party member who asks for them (number of combinations of words such as “vice”, “chairman”, “director”, “secretary”, “coordinator” and “committee” - truly inexhaustible).

From the members of other party factions you have recruited, recruit new employees into your Club of Agitators, even if only for the duration of the campaign. You can even temporarily rename your club if it helps to get new members into it. For the final campaign, you will need four times more agitators than the greatest number of your agitators during the primaries.

Again the question is about the money for the campaign fund. Now it will be easier to assemble them, but you will need more of them. Best of all, you can do it if you donate the candidate to the governor’s party to the campaign manager of the party’s list of candidates, while managing the resources for your campaign on your own. And be sure to insist that the national party committee make a contribution to the fund of your election campaign, having previously taken care of that some clever businessman-politician does not intercept this money from you through his established contacts in the national committee. Some state and provincial party committees appear to be confident that party candidates are their cash cows from which they can raise money in exchange for their support. This is a completely wrong idea: the committees must collect the money themselves and allow them to support candidates. So if a party organization makes such a proposal, do not pay them for support: it is not worth the money spent.

But from the right party committees you can get money for the campaign fund and active assistance. Including - free, or partially free printing of your campaign materials. Therefore, your printing costs in this campaign will be lower than in the previous one - you will be able to use the typical print campaign provided by the party to all party candidates from the list. But you can also print your own materials, where the name of your candidate will be highlighted on the party list in large print or layout.

I will not describe in detail the final election campaign, it is in many ways similar to the primaries - except that the struggle in it is more intense, numerical indicators are higher, emotions are stronger, money expenditures are greater, and your position in this fight for compared with rivals - it is more unprofitable, since you are struggling, including with the previous owner of an elected office, while you are in power - with the Honorable Mr. Stoler, who has more influential friends than you have. On the other hand, during the reign of Stuler made some mistakes, and made some enemies, which gives you an advantage. But still, finding a contender for the post in power is usually regarded as an indisputable advantage; you need to take this advantage into account in your plans. If the Stoler is a puppet of a powerful and cohesive political mafia in power, then you not only need to work very hard on your campaign, you also need to be prepared for dirty political tricks and techniques, the most likely of which in such a situation are vote counting tricks on election night. Therefore, think about which polling stations may have problems of this kind, and send the observer the smallest woman from among your volunteers: such an observer will be completely safe, while a male observer you send can return, for example, with a broken one. by hand. More than in the primaries, you will be bored by other characters: Influential Figures, traders with “pocket voices”, confused idle idlers underfoot, and seekers of government posts - in general, all those who complicate political work without bringing additional electoral votes. .

But even in the epicenter of all this hustle and confusion, do not forget about the most important thing for what you do all this - electoral votes, which are still where the voters live, that is, at the polling stations. And whatever Important Persons are advising you from the central office of the party, visiting the voters is still the only way to collect the very votes you need.

Follow your custom of the last campaign to devote a round of voters two days a week, half a day each time. Assign to your candidate the next 500 hours of voter rounds, making his schedule in such a way that he can do other things.

Like last time, build your campaign around the activities of your agitators, who, until election day, should not do anything other than bypass voters.
Just like last time, ignore the opposition.

The only differences between the final campaign and the primaries are:

a) In general, in your campaign you are campaigning for the entire party list, highlighting your candidate with more frequent references to him in campaigning for the party list and party program.

b) As before, you bypass voters, according to their lists, ignoring, however, voters who voted for the primaries. Because you can rely on them - with the exception of those who need to personally take to the polls (and you will do it this time). These voters themselves will come to the polls and vote for candidates from the party list. , , , , . 40 000 , , . , , , , , – «» .

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