My state still had open and legal "patronage". I had to go to the Republican precinct committeeman (there was a GOP governor) and get a card saying I had "clearance" in order to get hired by a state agency.
Also, 2% of my tiny salary was diverted to the GOP coffers. (Really.) On election day, we were expected to go work at the polls as a Republican worker without pay.
This had been going on for decades. And every time the governor's position changed parties, most state employees were subject to firing, and there would be mass hiring of people from the other party.
The license bureaus (motor vehicles) were run by the county chairpersons of the ruling party (who usually owned the building and rented it to the DMV). They were beyond incompetent. I remember having to register a new car when I was 7 months pregnant, and the line was around the building. I sat on the curb with a brand new mother with a two-week old infant. We had to go through this as you had to get cars registered every year within a two-week period.
We all complained, but it was like complaining about the weather. We all just accepted that this is what was normal. Finally, this was all outlawed, and everything came under a civil service type system. But I still remember how accepting we all were. If we wanted a state job, we just accepted that we had to go kowtow to some yokel precinct committeeman. We just accepted that every year, we'd take a half-day off work to spend hours registering our car.
It's a lesson in how easy it is to get people to accept political corruption.
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