Imagine the little town of Maple. Small town folk. Population has gotten smaller but the town has stable revenue. Some people in the surrounding region have settled there. People are involved in the community. They meet in the town hall to decide on municipal taxes and how the revenue will be spent. Not a lot of graft or patronage because everybody knows each other more or less and people take pride in their town.
Let's say someone from the city decides it's a lovely place and decides to sway the laws to make it easier for people he knows in the city to settle there and to have the municipal funds benefit them disproportionately.
Now let's imagine that our city slicker arranges for a horde of his affiliates in the city to show up and vote for the people and policies that will benefit them even though only citizens of the town are supposed to cast a ballot.
Now there are all sorts of reasons why it would be hard to get away with this in a small town, though no one would doubt that there was something sleazy about it whether they got away with it or not. But it's a lot easier to pull off at a national level. All you need is to a bribe a group of illegal incomers with bounty from the community chest, and they will vote for you if you make it so they can tip the democratic process in their favor by giving you the power. And it's easy to do with a group of people that had no investment in the town and no reason to care for it, other than that it's a mere opportunity.
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