No-Spot Dice and Modern Elections
Everything I need to know about the 2022 elections, I learned from Guys and Dolls. My parents met at a Young Republican Halloween party in Chicago in the late 1950s. They were precinct captains and election judges, first in Chicago, then in Evanst...
The plot of Frank Loesser’s classic musical Guys and Dolls revolves around Nathan Detroit’s floating crap game. While the game itself is technically illegal (like most activities in America today, gambling is only legal if the government gets a cut), a night of gambling is profoundly ethical. Each game, from poker to blackjack, has clear rules to which everyone agrees in advance; you have witnesses watching the play of the hand to keep it honest; you have to pay your debts promptly.
Until that sudden, jarring moment in which Chicago gangster Big Jule shows up and forces them all to play with his dice, which are just plain cubes, without spots, because he says he “had the spots removed for luck,” but that’s okay because he remembers where the spots formerly were. Why use Big Jule’s dice? Because Big Jule has a gun, and he can’t possibly win with honest dice.
The cast is horrified. Nobody ever questioned Nathan Detroit’s crap game before, because he ran an honest game; now all of a sudden, this thug shows up, packing heat and changing the rules, cheating to steal from all the honest gamblers in the room.
For a long time now, but especially in 2020 and 2022, American elections have been compromised by vote fraud. New York’s Tammany Hall was the most famous example in the 1800s. Everyone knew that LBJ stole his first congressional seat in Texas with Ballot Box 13. It’s been so well accepted that Chicago vote fraud put John F. Kennedy over the top in 1960 that politicians, including JFK himself, have joked about it for generations.
So, Democrat vote fraud in America is nothing new. It’s been so deeply factored into American politics that every Republican candidate, in planning his campaign and reviewing his polling, asks not the question “can we win?” but rather, “can we overcome the margin of fraud?”