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MY POV -
“The ballots made no result; the counters made the result.” – William Boss Tweed
There may be less cigar smoke and no identifiable Boss Tweed holding court in a back room, but the operating model he perfected is thriving in Tax-a-fornia. The old Tammany Hall political machine in the mid 1800’s traded jobs, favors, housing, protection, and contracts for votes. The California Democratic machine trades public money and government power to reward favored constituencies: union contracts, nonprofit grants, consultant deals, public-sector jobs, homeless-service funding, regulatory protection, and ideological cover. In return, those constituencies provide political loyalty: campaign money, endorsements, ballot harvesting, signature gathering, turnout operations, public testimony, media pressure, activist support, and silence when the system fails.
Tammany Hall, the Democratic political machine that controlled NYC politics for roughly 80 years, understood that political power is not built by winning arguments. It is built by controlling dependency. The old machine helped immigrants find work, food, housing, legal assistance, and protection. In return, it expected votes, loyalty, silence, and obedience. The ward boss was not merely a campaign worker. He was the broker between desperation and power.
California has updated that model for the administrative state. Today, the ward boss may be a union leader, a nonprofit executive, a political consultant, a public-agency gatekeeper, a homeless-services contractor, a signature gatherer, or a campaign operative. The old machine handed out favors directly. The new machine launders patronage through programs, grants, contracts, initiatives, and bureaucracies.
That is why homelessness in Los Angeles is no longer merely a humanitarian catastrophe. It has become a political economy that keeps select NGO executives prosperous and campaign coffers filled. Billions are spent. Encampments persist. Outreach programs proliferate. Government announces another plan, another grant, another emergency, another study group. The public sees collapse. The machine sees bigger budgets and more contributions for their campaigns.
This is legalized patronage, a functional quid pro quo. It does not look like a cash bribe. It often looks like a contract, a grant, a consulting fee, a union slate, a ballot measure, a nonprofit partnership, or a “community investment.” The money is public. The benefit is political. The accountability is nonexistent. Failure does not break the loop.
The same machine logic appears wherever California spends the most and delivers the least. The High-Speed Rail fiasco may be the clearest symbol of legalized extraction in California. Eighteen years later, we are not even close to having a bullet train, but everyone attached to the project keeps getting paid: consultants, lawyers, contractors, agencies, planners, environmental reviewers, union labor, political allies, and bureaucrats. Presto change-o: failure becomes a successful funding model. The worse the project performs, the more studies, extensions, appropriations, revisions, consultants, and contracts it requires. Expected cost per Prop 1A was $33 Billion. Now, estimates run as high as $231 billion. This is how criminally inefficient California's bureaucracy has become.
In the private sector, a project this late, this expensive, and this incomplete would trigger firings, litigation, bankruptcy, or liquidation. That is not merely inefficiency. It is soft corruption turned into a business plan, legal enough to continue and so immense as to make Boss Tweed look like an amateur.
A recent federal case involving Los Angeles alleged that a longtime signature collector paid people, including homeless people on Skid Row, to register to vote and sign petitions. This is where the hard corruption and illegality begin to surface. It shows how the modern machine can turn vulnerable people into political inventory. Skid Row becomes the new immigrant ward. The homeless shelter becomes the new tenement. The ballot collector becomes the new precinct captain. The cash-for-signatures operator becomes the new street-level broker.
Boss Tweed would recognize the model immediately. This is where California’s election laws create obvious openings for corruption and fraud. The state has legalized broad third-party ballot collection, commonly called ballot harvesting. In theory, a voter designates someone to return a ballot. In practice, organized political operations collect ballots from people who are dependent, transient, addicted, mentally ill, elderly, isolated, poorly informed, or desperate.
A private citizen casting a secret ballot at a precinct is one thing. Another is a ballot gathered by a political field operation in Skid Row, a shelter, a recovery setting, or an encampment. The danger is not limited to forged ballots. The dangers are pressure, confusion, inducement, dependency, manipulation, and payola that may be almost impossible to detect once the ballot disappears into the count.
Paying someone to vote is illegal. Paying someone not to vote is illegal. But laws against vote buying do not make a system safe if the state simultaneously creates election procedures that make exploitation easier and detection harder. The people who would abuse these laws don’t care about them unless they get caught.
The state says it opposes fraud while designing elections around mass mail ballots, ballot harvesting, weak identification rules, same-day registration, permissive signature curing, late-arriving ballots, dirty voter rolls, drop boxes, centralized tabulation, and limited observer challenges. This is how the system became untrustworthy: the safeguards that would verify legitimacy have been weakened or removed.
This is why the old Election Day mattered. Voting in person was not merely a procedure. It was a civic ritual. Citizens appeared at a local precinct, signed in, received a ballot, voted privately, and participated in a shared act of self-government. California has converted that ritual into a mass logistics operation. Ballots move through mail streams, drop boxes, collectors, curing processes, software systems, signature screens, warehouse-style counting centers, and delayed tabulation.
That is also why AB 2624, quickly dubbed by critics the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” belongs in this story. Officially, the bill is sold as a privacy protection measure for service providers facing threats or harassment. But in the context of California’s taxpayer-funded nonprofit complex, the political meaning is hard to miss. When citizen journalists begin asking uncomfortable questions about publicly funded organizations, Sacramento’s reflex is not to demand audits, open books, and measure outcomes. It immediately tries to create new legal shields to hide the swindle.
That is how California’s political elite protect themselves. The public is told that transparency is harassment, that investigation is intimidation, and that exposing possible fraud is dangerous. To whom? Boss Tweed would understand the move immediately. A political dynasty does not survive only by handing out favors. It survives by punishing inquiry, hiding embarrassment, and making the cost of scrutiny too high for ordinary citizens.
The union question matters for the same reason. Powerful unions in California do not merely bargain over wages. They sponsor candidates, fund campaigns, craft ballot measures, pressure legislators, mobilize voters, and shape public policy. Some union-backed measures will directly raise taxes and expand government spending. That is their legal right. But it becomes a structural conflict when the same public-sector union ecosystem that finances campaigns also sits inside the government machinery that administers public functions.
If the referees, scorekeepers, rule-writers, funders, and beneficiaries all come from the same team, where are the checks and balances that make Democracy possible?
Boss Tweed did not need every city worker to be corrupt. He needed the machine to control enough jobs, contracts, favors, voters, money, and fear to make opposition futile. California’s machine functions the same way through public payrolls, union political spending, nonprofit dependency, ballot operations, and media protection.
The tax system is the next stage of extraction. California is not merely using ballots to choose representatives. It is using ballots to authorize deeper claims on income, property, wealth, businesses, sales, and future generations. A union-backed “Billionaire Tax” is marketed as a one-time levy on the ultra-rich. But every confiscatory tax begins as a targeted moral crusade before the political class discovers it needs to extract more lucre. Meanwhile, local governments push sales taxes, parcel taxes, transfer taxes, business taxes, bond measures, and permanent extensions of “temporary” taxes to feed systems that cannot account for the money already spent.
If the ballot process is opaque, unverifiable, and structurally tilted toward the same party that benefits from higher taxes, then the issue becomes more than an election procedure. It becomes taxation without meaningful representation. Citizens should not be asked to surrender more of their income through an untrustworthy voting system.
The proposed expansion of noncitizen voting in Los Angeles reveals the same logic. Expanding local voting to noncitizens would weaken the meaning of citizenship and convert the ballot into another tool of machine politics. Tammany organized immigrant wards because dependency could be turned into votes. Los Angeles appears eager to modernize the same idea under the guise of inclusion. Voting is supposed to be a sacrament of citizenship.
The productive middle class sees the pattern and leaves. Over time, these dynamics reshape the electorate until the machine no longer needs to cheat; it has already engineered the electorate it needs.
This is why public confidence in elections is not optional. A free society requires losers to believe they lost fairly and squarely. It requires clean rolls, lawful ballots, observable counting, hard identity standards, a transparent chain of custody, and meaningful audits. California has moved in the opposite direction.
That is why California is the new Tammany Hall. “The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury, and the ballot box”, according to his biographer. California has built a political machine in which public money, dependency, ballot rules, union power, NGO funding, media silence, the courts, the supermajority in the legislature, and tax extraction reinforce one another. It’s virtually the Tweed political playbook with a few updates.
A state that cannot prove the integrity of its elections has no moral authority to demand ever more taxes from the citizens trapped under its yoke.
(Eliot Cohen is a longtime civic advocate who has served on the Neighborhood Council, the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council, and the Board of Homeowners of Encino, where he was president of HOME for over seven years. A retired Wall Street executive with a 35-year career, Eliot brings a sharp eye to local governance. He critiques the bureaucratic missteps of City, County, and State officials. Eliot and his wife split their time between Los Angeles and Baja Norte, Mexico.)
