Governor JB Pritzker’s earnest defense of Chicago’s electoral integrity is a comedic gem when viewed through the lens of the city’s storied 150-year history of political shenanigans. Chicago, after all, is infamous for its machine politics, where the Democratic Party’s iron grip ensured votes were tallied with a wink and a nod—sometimes with ballots cast by the dearly departed or mysteriously multiplied in smoky backrooms. From the days of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who reportedly could make votes appear like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, to modern allegations of precinct-level “irregularities,” the idea that Chicago’s elections are a bastion of purity is a punchline that writes itself. Pritzker’s claim might hold more water if the city’s history didn’t read like a crime novel, with tales of stuffed ballot boxes and precinct captains who knew how to “count creatively.”

Then comes Pritzker’s wild-eyed warning that President Trump might deploy the military to rig elections, evoking dystopian images of tanks rolling up to polling stations and soldiers snatching ballot boxes like some Putin-orchestrated coup or a scene from a Nazi propaganda reel. It’s a vivid fantasy, but one that collapses under its own absurdity when you consider the logistics. The military, with its chain of command and pesky thing called the Constitution, isn’t exactly a personal goon squad for any president to deploy at will. The Posse Comitatus Act, for starters, limits federal troops from domestic law enforcement, and the idea of soldiers storming Chicago’s polling places to “protect the vote” sounds like a fever dream from a political thriller, not reality. Pritzker’s fear-mongering here is less a policy critique and more a script for a low-budget dystopian flick, complete with dramatic music and grainy footage of ballot-box heists.

But the real kicker is the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Trump could just lean on StarLink to electronically manipulate Chicago’s voting machines from space, as if the 2024 election was a sci-fi caper. This satirical jab exposes the hilarity of Pritzker’s accusations by flipping the script: why bother with boots on the ground when you’ve got satellites in orbit? The notion that voting machines could be hacked from space is as delightfully absurd as Pritzker’s military conspiracy, poking fun at the governor’s penchant for dramatic hypotheticals while ignoring Chicago’s own checkered electoral past. It’s a perfect satire of how both sides can spin wild tales, but when you’ve got a city with a legacy of vote-rigging as colorful as Chicago’s, maybe it’s best to leave the conspiracy theories to the tabloids and focus on cleaning up the local precincts first.