You're not going to believe this. The dead in Hudson County have been disenfranchised. Remember those stories about how the deceased in Hudson rose like the Great Pumpkin every election day to vote the straight Democratic ticket? The best Democratic precinct in all New Jersey, it was said, was Holy Name Cemetery on West Side Avenue in Jersey City. Well, no more. According to a recent study, Hudson's voter rolls have been purged of the dearly departed. You've got to be above ground now to vote anywhere in the county. The news that the dead can no longer vote in Jersey City or elsewhere in that county produced a mixed reaction among the politically attuned. "It doesn't surprise me," said Bernard Hartnett, former Hudson Democratic chairman. "Reform is finally taking hold." But it came as something of a blow to Paul Byrne, a longtime Jersey City Democratic operative and dedicated traditionalist. "I want to thoroughly discourage such erroneous reports," said Byrne.
Jersey City is pretty picky about observing proper electoral practice, Byrne said. He cited a letter written by one candidate in next Tuesday's mayoral election complaining that a rival doesn't live in the city. The offended candidate wrote that he could "embrace" the idea that the dead have been known to vote in Jersey City -- "they are, after all, permanent residents," Byrne observed. But extending the franchise to an out-of-towner is just not done. (Actually, the city once had a mayor who wasn't even a U.S. citizen, but that's another story.)
In truth, most of Hudson's hoary history as a center of exotic voting practices dates back to the Frank Hague and John Kenny Democratic machines that dominated state politics for much of the last century and operated with little oversight from law enforcement or the courts. Tom Fleming remembers those days. Now a successful novelist and historian living in Manhattan, Fleming is the son of one of Hague's "12 apostles," his Jersey City ward leaders. Hague didn't need to steal votes, Fleming said, because he had no serious opposition. But Fleming, from personal experience, has no doubt the dead did their duty on Election Day. His grandmother died in 1940, Fleming recalled, but he was instructed to tell election officials who came by asking if she lived there to assure them that Mary Fitzmaurice Dolan was still there, alive and well. It's assumed she made an annual posthumous contribution to the Democratic vote total.
The extent of graveyard voting is probably overstated. And it couldn't compare with practices such as the "four o'clock card" scam in swelling the Democratic vote. It worked like this: Anyone who hadn't voted by 4 p.m. received a visit from a Democratic worker. If no one was home, a card was inserted in the door and the voter's name entered on a list. Sometime before voting ended, committee workers checked back and, if any cards were still untouched, the voters were assumed to be gone for the day. But not disenfranchised.
Everyone in Jersey City seems to have a story of voting villainy. Paper ballots were pilfered and used to stuff precinct ballot boxes, occasionally with more votes than there were registered voters. Voting machines made theft more difficult. But Hudson Democrats were up to the challenge. State Sen. Bernard Kenny of Hoboken recalls being told that certain sprockets or gears in voting machines could be filed down to record only, say, eight or nine votes for an opposition candidate instead of the 10 cast for him. The enterprise and ingenuity of the Democratic machines in such matters knew few limits. Occasionally, they went too far, such as the time in the 1950s when whole precincts in Jersey City recorded no votes -- zero -- for Republicans. This raised eyebrows. T. James Tumulty, the 300-pound poet laureate of the Kenny machine, had no trouble explaining the apparent discrepancy. Simple, he explained: They voted Democratic -- had a Road to Damascus experience, Jersey City style...