I'm veering onto a different track starting with this essay. I'll look at how specific cities fared in the 2020 general election regarding widespread voter fraud. Election fraud claims tend to single out cities with substantial numbers of Black and Brown residents. Detroit, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Phoenix, and Milwaukee, for example.

In this essay, I focus on Chicago, often cited as the most corrupt city in the United States as far as elections go. It is said that JFK wouldn't have won the 1960 presidential election without the help of all the dead voters in Chicago.

The Lie

For much of the last century, Chicago has been considered one of the largest Democratic strongholds in the United States. Everybody knows Democrats are corrupt and that they cheat and lie and steal elections as part of their plot to turn America communist. As 33sarge noted in a FoxNews.com comment:

Democrats are taking over our country one little step at a time, without any military action, and we are allowing it to happen under the premise that it is the right thing to do. This is nothing less than an attack on our republic from inside our own country.

Election fraud is deeply embedded in the City of Chicago. Remember what President Donald Trump said about Chicago?

“Voter fraud is all too common,” he told a crowd earlier this month in Colorado. “Take a look at Chicago, take a look at St. Louis. Take a look at some of these cities, where you see things happening that are horrendous.”

That prescient statement is from 2016. President Trump knew 4 years ago there would be horrendous voter fraud in the 2020 election! The man is psycho, er, psychic!

The Rebuttal

The 2016 article quoted below was written to combat Trump's claim about Chicago. If you thought 2020 was Trump's first use of election fraud as a weapon, you'll be surprised to learn that Trump first cried election fraud during the 2016 campaign. An example from August 2016: "The only way we can lose Pennsylvania to Hillary Clinton is if cheating goes on."

“In the last ten years we’ve had 9 million votes cast,” says the Chicago Election Board’s James Allen. “We’ve had ten instances that we’ve had to refer to the state’s attorney’s office, but we’ve been through exhaustive recounts and we’ve never seen any votes reversed as a result of any kind of mishap or fraud.”

“We have a paper trail for every ballot cast in the City of Chicago,” Allen says. “So we feel reasonably safe about our system.”

“A statewide death-record database helps us cancel more than 500 registrations every month in Chicago alone,” Allen continued. “We also send an annual canvass notice to each voter. The postal service and the recipients may mark ‘deceased’ and drop it in the mail.”

Trump Calls Out Chicago, But Are His Election Concerns Real?

The Sanity Checks

I've developed a set of heuristics that help establish or debunk election cheating in a particular area. They include registered voter statistics, demographics, election results, and more.

Party Registration

Illinois doesn't register voters by party. However, an alternative way of looking at the proportion of Democrats to Republicans is by participation in party primary elections. Here are the numbers for the March 17, 2020 and March 15, 2016 primaries:

That seems pretty clear. Chicago is a heavily Democratic city. That fact should be reflected in the 2020 general election vote, and it is. Biden received 82.5% while Trump received 15.8%. Fairly close to the 2016 primary percentages, although it appears Dominion voting machines switched 100,000 or so of Joe's votes to Trump. Kidding!!

Fewer Republicans voted in the 2020 primary since Trump was the mostly unchallenged incumbent. His primary opponent, Roque ''Rocky'' De La Fuente, received 8.4% of the 2020 primary vote. Poor Rocky was demolished by "Apollo" Trump. Although it does show that not all Republicans are in love with Trump.

Interestingly, there were also fewer Democratic voters in the Democratic primary. However, Biden did beat Bernie Sanders 53.2% to 41.8%, which is wider than Hillary Clinton's 53.7% to 45.3% win over Sanders in 2016.

Demographics

Chicago is 33.3% White, 29.6% Black, 16.6% Latino, and 6.6% Asian. The 2020 general election results are consistent with a liberal Northern city of that composition.

Registration and Turnout

There were 1,524,598 registered voters at the time of the primary elections on March 17th. That increased to 1,584,293 by November 3rd, an increase of 3.8%. The 59,695 new registrations from March to November are not unusual for a presidential election year. The 2016 increase was 3.4%.

In the 2020 presidential election, Chicago's turnout was 73.3%, with 1,160,993 ballots cast. Chicago's turnout of 73.3% is comparable to the overall State of Illinois 73.8% turnout.

Undervote Crosscheck

I'm using undervote to mean the situations where people didn't vote for a president, voted for president but not for a Congressional office, or didn't vote for a state constitutional amendment.

If there had been a large number of ballots with substantially more votes cast for president than senator, it could indicate fraud because fraudsters are able to quickly generate more votes for their favored candidate when they only mark the presidential section of the ballot.

Undervotes for 2020 are within normal parameters and are, in fact, fewer than in 2016.

Shockingly, more people in 2020 were interested in voting for or against the tax law change to move the state from a flat rate to a progressive income tax than had voted for the exciting Transportation Taxes and Fees Lockbox amendment in 2016.

The progressive tax amendment passed in Chicago 71.4% to 28.6% but failed statewide.

Conclusion

There is nothing to indicate Chicago's 2020 general election vote was anomalous or suffered from irregularity. The election appears to have been well run and was not rife with Democratic voter fraud. JFK's Chicago is no more.