The number of dead voters in Chicago has been dwindling over the past half century, but the coronavirus pandemic has the potential to restore the supply to healthy levels not seen since the death of Mayor Richard J. Daley, said Mayor Lori Lightfoot at a press conference today.
“The Chicago metropolitan region has still been the most corrupt area in the country since 1976, but Illinois is only the third-most corrupt state in the union, after New York and California,” Lightfoot said. “The pandemic will help us fix that.”
Lightfoot said her administration thinks it can restore dead voter registrations at least back to 1983 levels, when about 10 percent of Chicago’s one million votes for governor, mayor, city council, and other public officials were fraudulent.
The city has a big task ahead of it, but Lightfoot is optimistic.
“Thanks to better technology and morals, Democrats don’t have to get voters’ names from cemeteries like we did in the 1930s, or by visiting every hotel and flophouse on the West Side to get lists of dead people like we did in the 1980s,” said Lightfoot, who won election in 2019 on a platform of ending corruption.
