Editing Political machine (section)

===Voting strategy===
Many machines formed in cities to serve immigrants to the U.S. in the late 19th century who viewed machines as a vehicle for political [[Suffrage|enfranchisement]]. Machine workers helped win elections by turning out large numbers of voters on election day. It was in the machine's interests to only maintain a minimally winning amount of support. Once they were in the majority and could count on a win, there was less need to recruit new members, as this only meant a thinner spread of the patronage rewards to be spread among the party members. As such, later-arriving immigrants, such as Jews, Italians, and other immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe between the 1880s and 1910s, saw fewer rewards from the machine system than the well-established Irish.<ref>{{cite book|first=Steven P. |last=Erie|title=Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840–1985|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NxrGXFRlbWgC&pg=PA7|year=1990|publisher=University of California Press|pages=7–8|isbn=9780520910621}}</ref> At the same time, the machines' staunchest opponents were members of the middle class, who were shocked at the malfeasance and did not need the financial help.<ref>Ari A. Hoogenboom, "An Analysis of Civil Service Reformers". ''Historian'' 23#1 (1960): 54–78.</ref>

The corruption of [[urban politics in the United States]] was denounced by private citizens. They achieved national and state civil-service reform and worked to replace local patronage systems with [[civil service]]. By [[Theodore Roosevelt]]'s time, the [[Progressive Era]] mobilized millions of private citizens to vote against the machines.<ref>{{cite journal | last1 = Ruhil | first1 = Anirudh V. S. | year = 2003 | title = Urban Armageddon or politics as usual? The case of municipal civil service reform | journal = American Journal of Political Science | volume = 47 | issue = 1| pages = 159–170 | doi=10.1111/1540-5907.00011}}</ref>