The watcher telephones the outcome to headquarters, where you and Upright are keeping your own tally while chewing your naUs down to the elbows. Then she, or he, goes to the election party.
The Election Night Party: When the polls closed you moved from the office headquarters to the space in which die Doorbell Club meets. You expect three times the membership of the Club but that's all right - let 'em crowd in; it makes them happier.
You did not stop for dinner; your stomach isn't behaving quite as it should. A sandwich picked up "to go" is all you want. Upright shows up from the field about the time you get there and the two of you, alone for once, or with the office girl and one or two others, get ready for the party. You place someone at the telephone and arm her with a tally sheet. You turn on the radio to the best station for returns-the snap tallies on the major offices are already beginning to come in - and set up the big black board to post returns on the whole ballot You place an excited, high school-age adherent in charge of this, and turn your attention to the refreshments.
Three times the membership of your organization gives a figure of 300 - three hundred quarts of beer. That's a lot of beer; you have purchased it in kegs, if you could not get it donated, and made an arrangement to return untapped kegs for credit, so you display only one keg at a time and keep the rest under lock and key. You have five hundred paper cups, not of the largest size.
Coffee and soft drinks are available for those who do not drink. A very small amount of food, doughnuts, cheese and crackers, has been obtained, but you hide it away and will not display it until about one o'clock in the morning.
Don't try to serve hard liquor; it will bankrupt you. Some will bring their own and some will get tipsy. It?s a free country.
A few people are beginning to show up and it breaks up the depression that you and Upright have been suffering from since the polls closed. They crowd around him, shaking his hand and slapping him on the back, and urging him to have a drink "right out of the bottle." Some of them also speak to you.
After that they pour in a steady stream; the place gets crowded and stays crowded. Most of them are your friends; some of them are the perennials who go to all the election parties every election night. You wedge yourself in back of a table to get away from the press and bend one ear to the telephone while trying to watch the telephone tally and eat your sandwich and drink some coffee. Judge Yardwide, according to the radio, has a safe
lead over the field for the gubernatorial nomination. You nod knowingly and with pleasure - with Yardwide at the head of the ticket the final election should be easier to win.
The first telephone reports come in; they are simply awfull Your sandwich shows a tendency to want to come up again. Upright squeezes his way through the crowd, nodding and smiling and speaking to people, then bends over and glances at the figures.
His face is suddenly grave, but he pats your arm. "Never mind," he says. "It's all been worth it, even if we lose. If I ever run again I want you to manage me."
You feel like bursting into tears, but there are too many people present
After a while it begins to swing. Upright is creeping up on Hopeful.... Upright-982; Hopeful-1,005. Upright-2,107; Hopeful - 2,043. You're ahead!
Upright - 5,480; Hopeful - 5,106. You begin to breathe more easily.
Upright-9,817; Hopeful -8,166
Upright - 12,042; Hopeful-Wait a minute-you hear your district number mentioned on the radio, and the telephone is ringing at the same time. "Quiet! Keep quiet-please!"
You get some modicum of surcease, at least around the radio: " - minor contest seems to be settled," the announcer is saying cheerfully. "Jack Hopeful, through his manager, has just conceded the nomination in the Umpteenth District to the Honorable Jonathan Upright. The statement urges all voters to support the Demican ticket this fall. Mr. Hopeful could not be reached for a personal interview but it is understood that- "
You don't hear the rest. You've won.
The rest of the evening is pretty light-hearted. You break away from the radio and circulate around a bit even though your feet are killing you. You try a glass of beer but you let it go flat while you duck back to the radio. The attorney general fight has taken a very interesting twist; it's likely to cause some complications. About three a.m. you and the nominee and two other faithfuls squeeze into a booth in an all night restaurant and you eat the biggest meal you have eaten in over two weeks. You've got die first edition with the preliminary returns and you eat while one of you reads the figures aloud.
At four a.m. you fall into bed and die. Post-Mortem Upright- 16,107 Hopeful-11,373
Figures from earlier contests, corrected for population and registration changes, show that a candidate in a two-man race will receive 10,000 votes in your district if he files and makes a superficial campaign. Comparison with other districts and previous years on a percentage basis shows that your district had 2,000 votes more than normal.
Therefore your campaign methods stirred out about 6,000 votes, of which some 2,000 were new votes not normally to be expected in a primary. This is the final proof of the correctness of your technique, since winning could have resulted from the deficiencies of Hopeful's campaign rather than the excellence of yours.
Detailed examination of the results by individual precincts shows that the candidate stirred out between a third and a quarter of the majority and that the precinct workers did the rest. The decision to have Upright go directly to the homes of the voters has been justified.
The cupboard is bare but the bills are paid - all but the beer; you pledged your own credit on that. You must remember to return the two kegs left over - that will help, and perhaps you can get one or two others to divvy up while they are still feeling good over the victory. Upright intends to reimburse you but you don't want to stick him for it - his personal expenses have been a little heavier than he had anticipated.
We Was Robbed! Or perhaps you did not win. Maybe there was a bad break at the last moment, or a schism in the Club, or something. Suppose the outcome was: Hopeful-12,785; Upright-12,009.
It is easy to cry fraud, easy to charge it up to a machine, to dirty campaigning, to stuffed ballot boxes. But you won't be right, not one time in a thousand. No, citizen, depend on it - if you lose it is almost certain that it was because not enough people wanted your man to win and most especially that not enough supporters worked hard enough or intelligently enough.
At the very least in every election there is a high percentage who just don't vote - in a primary more than 50%. You cannot blame those lost votes on chicanery. Perhaps you did the best you could and the outcome was indeed affected by some dirty tricks, at the polls or elsewhere, but the result still represents die will of the American people, at least by passive consent. Accept it
Closing Ranks: You won't get anything out of your workers and you won't try to - you will wait till the next regular meeting of the Doorbell Club. In the meantime you are very busy.
There is the matter of gathering up records of the primary in order not to have to depend on the county clerk's records next time. Some of the precinct area supervisors may be disciplined enough to help you do this, but the let-down may continue until the posted voting record and results have been taken down. A 35-mm. camera furnishes a convenient way to get these records without stopping to copy the data, but it's too big a job to cover die entire district single-handed even widi a camera to help you. Do the best you can and pick up die rest from die official records next winter.