In this week’s cover story, I reported about “the Chicago Housing authority’s sleeping giant”—the 47,000 households     participating in the Housing Choice Voucher program (also known as Section     8)—and attempts of those residents to organize a representative group. 


                     “You had patronage precinct workers who had jobs in City Hall or the like,     whose business it was to go door to door [in the projects] to register     people and turn out the vote,” says Dick Simpson, a former 44th Ward     alderman and elections expert who teaches political science at UIC. “In the really bad     old days they’d threaten to cut off their public housing if they didn’t go     vote.” In 1969 Simpson worked on the aldermanic campaign of     African-American social worker John Stevens in the 42nd ward, which     included Cabrini-Green. Stevens lost to Raymond K. Fried, a white, machine     candidate who didn’t even campaign because he was hospitalized at the time.     When the votes were counted, it turned out that Fried secured more than 90     percent of the vote in several public housing precincts—winning one 400 to     12. Stevens, meanwhile, did better in the white precincts outside of the     projects, even after his campaign headquarters suspiciously burned to the ground.



                     Of the 16 wards with very large concentrations of vouchers (more than 50     residents living in a vouchered household per 1,000 people in the ward), ten     had aldermanic races that could’ve been decided by voucher holders in     2015 (if they voted as a bloc, of course). Among these wards, the margin for victory was greatest in the Seventh Ward, with Greg Mitchell beating his incumbent opponent in a runoff by 1,561     votes; the margin was smallest in the 16th Ward, where Alderman Toni     Foulkes beat her opponent in a runoff by just 143 votes. There are about     2,887 vouchered households in Mitchell’s ward, and some 1,315 in Foulkes’s.     This safely translates to at least one eligible voter per household given     that vouchers are allocated to adults and neither of these wards (nor any     of the other eight in which voucher holders could’ve decided the     aldermanic races) have significant immigrant populations. (Only U.S.     citizens and limited categories of non-citizens qualify for the voucher     program.)