Case Closed

For decades, politicians who have lost an election in Chicago have greeted the grey dawn of defeat with a ritualistic chant: "Fraud!" But in the bitter aftermath of last November's presidential elections, Republicans echoed the familiar refrain with particular vehemence. Their charge: fraud at the polls had helped John F. Kennedy pile up a 318,736 plurality in Democratically controlled Cook County, a big enough margin to carry Illinois by 8,858 votes and capture the state's 27 electoral votes.

Despite well-financed efforts to prove that they had been bilked. Republicans soon realized that there was far from enough evidence of fraud to hold out any hope of changing the election result. But a continuing uproar in the press forced the chief justice of Cook County's criminal court to appoint a special state's attorney and order a more formal investigation. The special attorney: a chubby Democratic lawyer named Morris Wexler. Skeptics sat back and waited for a whitewash. But Wexler began digging for Democratic dirt with Republican zeal, eventually went before the Cook County court with charges of massive voting irregularities involving 677 election judges in 133 precincts.

On the bench sat longtime Democrat John Marshall Karns. When Wexler argued that some precincts had miscounted paper ballots, Karns threw out the cases after noting that the ballots had been involved in recounts and thus had been open to post-election hanky-panky. When Wexler claimed that unqualified voters had been admitted to the polls, Karns dismissed the charges on the ground of faulty evidence.

Last week Judge Karns finally closed the case of the disputed election by disposing of the last lingering charges from last November. Said he: "It was the cleanest election Chicago ever had.'' In Chicago, that was a small compliment.

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