Free Republic

Last week, The Gateway Pundit reported on Craig Callaway’s recent indictment in Atlantic City, NJ for “procuring, casting, and tabulating fraudulent ballots.” The former Atlantic City council president was caught allegedly paying New Jersey residents $30 to $50 to “act as authorized messengers and request mail-in ballots for voters whom they’d never met.” The alleged crime took place during the 2022 mid-term election when Callaway was paid $65,500 by Rep. Jeff Van Drew’s (R-02) campaign for “strategic consulting”. Rep. Van Drew had paid Callaway’s firm $110,000 for services in the 2020 campaign as well. Callaway faces up to five years...

On this date in 1896, during a driving Adirondack snowstorm, Bartholomew “Bat” Shea was electrocuted at New York’s Clinton Prison for a political murder two years prior. This was the great boom time for machine politics, corrupt political patronage networks doling “spoils” like jobs and benefits to members who in turn maintained a party’s stranglehold on an electorate. These flourished in an industrializing America’s burgeoning cities; Troy, N.Y., at 60,000-plus in the 1890s (it has fewer than that today), was one of upstate New York’s prime industrial centers, and home to a municipal machine rooted in Irish Catholic immigrants and...