Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Chad nervously clutched the piece of paper he held in his shaking fingers. He was dirty and unkempt—a typical person of the Chicago streets. But he had been picked up by bus that morning and brought to this precinct house with twelve of his fellows, each told that if they went into this precinct and voted using the name written on the paper in his hands, then did it again five more times during the course of the day, he would get two hot meals, $50, and a bottle of whiskey for his troubles.

Karen was waiting for him at the front of the line. She was in her mid-fifties, and a long time worker for the Chicago political machine. She saw Chad working his way up the line and stifled a moment of distaste, but she knew how things worked here. After all, one of her duties was to assure that the voter rolls were never properly scrubbed as people passed away. She knew that the person in front of her, and hundreds more like him, would be walking into any number of precincts intending to vote in place of one of those dead people.

When he got to the end of line in front of Karen, Chad looked around a little nervously. But this was Chicago; nobody really cared, and everyone expected it. Making not the slightest pretext, Chad looked at his piece of paper and gave the name on it: “Paul William Daniels.”

Karen was starting through her list, but stopped when a baritone voice boomed “Oh, NO you don’t.”

Startled, Karen looked up to see a translucent apparition appear in front of her, in the form of a man, appearing to rise waist up from the table she was seated at. Chad saw the same figure from behind.

“I am Paul William Daniels. I died twelve years ago, on September 4th, and I will not let you misuse my name for voting against my wishes again.”

Karen was shocked and scared; Chad, with his looser grip on reality, looked ready to bolt as if hiding from a narcotics agent. Things became worse when, two lines over, Chad saw a woman who had been on the bus with him earlier, and in front of her a female apparition stating “Oh, NO you don’t” to an equally astonished precinct worker.

Paul’s ghostly voice interjected again. “Deny this man my vote, and all will be well with you.”

Karen had recovered enough, and was part of the machine enough, to respond. “I don’t know what kind of trick this is, but even if you are a ghost, what can you do other than complain.” She turned to Chad. “Here is your ballot, Mr. Daniels.”

“This,” Paul said. Then a bolt of lightning flashed within the building. When the flash was over, Karen’s charred corpse lay smoking behind her desk, and somehow the list in front of her had the name “Paul William Daniels” burned to illegibility; nothing else at her desk was harmed. The brief moment of silence was punctuated by a second bolt of lightning two tables over.

Pandemonium reigned as the precinct workers all abandoned their posts and ran screaming, while many voters, including almost all of those who had come by bus with Chad, starting running also. Chad stood, too scared to move, as the apparition standing amid the table turned to him. The ghostly voice said, as the apparition faded, “You are a victim in this also, but you have been marked. If you appear in any other precincts, now or in the future, to vote falsely, you will suffer the same fate that—the ghost glanced back over its shoulder at Karen’s body—did.”

At this point, Chad’s will broke, and he ran screaming as the apparition faded away with a satisfied look on its face.

Similar and derivative scenes played out across Chicago—across the US—7,249,603 times that morning.