BSO: Election Scandal

Looks like October is…. Oct-over.

Its Now-vember, and that means voting. As usual, I cast my ballot at my quaint New England polling place.

Not much action on the ballot in Northampton, but plenty going on down in sublimely sketchy Springfield, where incumbent Mayor Dominic Sarno was re-elected over City Councilor Justin Hurst by a comfortable margin.

The contest was pretty much a bore for most of the campaign season (the conventional wisdom being that Sarno was a shoo-in for another term) only to have the race explode into drama in the home stretch when a vote rigging scandal broke out.

A vote rigging scandal in Springfield is of course unsurprising in a city where former Mayor Bob Markel once famously declared, "I don't trust any vote totals coming out of either the North End or Mason Square!" However, in this case it was not the local Democratic Party political machine being accused of trying to rig the results, but one of the candidates!

Allegedly, Justin Hurst and a convicted violent felon associated with the left-wing lobbying group Pioneer Valley Project were ferrying people from the local homeless shelter to the polls and paying them ten dollars apiece to vote for Hurst. The local media, led by the Springfield Newspapers, were shrieking with alarm. Oh my God! Hurst is trying to buy the election!

Myself, I was skeptical from the minute I heard about it.

Justin Hurst may come across at times as a race-obsessed liberal who doesn't like cops, but what he does not come across as is somebody who is dumb - and the whole concept of buying votes for ten dollars apiece is just flat out stupid. For example, a hundred bucks would only buy you ten votes, an irrelevancy in a contest in which thousands are participating. It's hard to believe that Hurst would have squandered his campaign cash and risked criminal charges for such a minimal return. Meanwhile, that same hundred bucks would get you a thirty second ad on a radio station where you could reach out to thousands of voters. In other words, the whole alleged vote bribing enterprise sounds ridiculous from the get-go.

Also intriguing is the participation of the Springfield Newspapers in whipping up the media frenzy. We've seen this movie before, especially when people like Richard Neal have been in electoral danger. Does anyone remember Marty Reilly, Ted Dimauro, Tony Ravosa and Alex Morse? Funny how those screaming headlines always appear in the nick of time.

Is that what happened here? Hard to say. The accusations are backed up by video that definitely shows that something weird was going on, but what exactly? And why? Who was behind it? Alas, with the election now past and Sarno safely back in the driver's seat, don't be surprised if all the unanswered questions regarding this "scandal" end up getting lost in that vast, over-flowing file in Springfield political history entitled, "Never to be Known."