Election '82: I thought I'd Seen Everything

After a long count, Jim Thompson claims victory in Illinois

When Big Jim Thompson voted on Tuesday morning, a winner's smile flashed across his broad face. Only two days before, a Gallup poll showed the bluff 6-ft. 6-in. Republican Governor leading his mild-mannered opponent, Adlai Stevenson III, by 16 points. But when Thompson went to bed at 2 Wednesday morning, the corners of his smile had turned downward: he was leading by just over 1%. By midday Thursday, as votes were still being tabulated, he was wearing a full-fledged frown of dismay: with more than 3.5 million votes cast, the once confident Thompson was leading by an infinitesimal 171 votes. He was forced to wait until Friday afternoon for all the ballots to be counted. Only then could he breathe easier: the final tally put him ahead by 9,401 votes. Yet he will be declared the winner only if the state board of elections certifies the results on Nov. 22. And that remains unsure.

From the moment the polls closed on a dreary, drizzly Chicago evening, a chain of events began that was so improbable, so coincidental, so questionable, that it could only have happened in Wonderland, or the Windy City. On election night, ballot boxes from 15 precincts inexplicably disappeared. Elsewhere, when voting machines malfunctioned, the official explanation was that rain and dampness had moistened the ballots, requiring them to be dried out in ovens in Evanston, just north of the city. ("There's no allegation of impropriety here," insisted Cook County Clerk Stanley Kusper Jr. "We've just got a lot of wet ballots.") The count began in earnest on Wednesday, the day, as wags point out, when the real politicking traditionally begins in Chicago. Before anyone could say Richard Daley, the city election board announced it was being hampered by repeated breakdowns of its new computer punch-card system.

On Thursday things got curiouser and curiouser. One ballot box was discovered in a shopping bag in a polling place, another turned up in the trunk of an election worker's car, and a third was found at the home of an election judge. By Thursday night, election officials said 15 of the traditionally Democratic Chicago precincts remained uncounted, as well as 106 in the Republican suburbs. Exclaimed an incredulous Thompson: "I've lived in Chicago a long time, and I thought I'd seen everything."

What he and others saw happening evoked uneasy memories of the 1960 presidential election, when the late Mayor Richard Daley was accused of tinkering with the Chicago vote to ensure John Kennedy's victory. The euphemism then, and now, was "waiting for the Riverside counties to come in"; in other words, waiting to determine how many phantom voters will have to be fished out of the Chicago River to secure a Democratic victory.

On paper, conditions seemed tailor-made for a resounding Democratic victory. Illinois is economically depressed. Plants have shuttered or hightailed it out of the state in record numbers. Stevenson, the thoughtful eldest son of the state's two-time Democratic presidential nominee, has the shiniest Democratic name around. How could he lose?