A loan officer, discovered to have embezzled more than a million dollars from customer accounts, was threatened with prosecution, but remained unruffled.
“Do you want all of your customers to know that their money is unsafe in your bank because you hire thieves as loan officers and they can steal undetected for years on end because your oversight is so lax?”
He had a point, cynical though it was.
Choosing not to prosecute, the bank directors reimbursed customer accounts and ate the losses, thus averting a scandal, the likely dissipation of public confidence, and the possible collapse of the bank.
Something similar may explain why we don't see more arrests for vote fraud, especially vote fraud on a massive scale.
Even good-government types are reluctant to go there, for fear of the negative impact it might have on voters. If elections are going to be stolen, why bother voting? If voter participation drops too low, how can any local, state, or federal official claim legitimacy, much less a mandate? So goes the thinking.
The repercussions could be enormous, and potentially irreversible.
Of course, we all know that vote fraud happens to some extent, but as long as we don't know how extensive it is – and we can't know, if it's never officially confirmed – we can't get too exercised about it.
Still, when there are more ballots counted than there are registered voters, and some of those ballots were apparently cast by non-citizens and non-humans, skepticism is warranted.
Washington Park mayoral candidate Terrilyn Gossett has her doubts about the absentee votes collected for next week's election.
In the village's 2015 election, 757 registered voters cast ballots. This year, the applications for mail-in ballots alone (842) almost equal that previous total. The 550+ ballots returned thus far include votes from at least one dead man and at least one incarcerated criminal, plus multiple ballots with the same return address.
It's safe to say, someone's trying to fix the outcome.