Election rallies were massive provocations, mixing theatrical spectacle with guerrilla warfare, Fourth of July pageantry with thuggery. The American clubs regularly held torchlight processions or grand illuminations featuring floats, fireworks, effigies, banners, speeches, and songs. Because the party that ruled the streets held sway at the polls, partisans regularly marched through opposing wards. They also infiltrated opposition rallies, where they threw the crowd into disarray by jabbing bystanders with the easily concealed shoemaker's awl, similar to a short ice pick. So beloved was the lowly awl that shortly before the presidential election in 1859, the American clubs engaged blacksmiths to forge them en masse, handed out flyers announcing their distribution, and incorporated the awl's image into club banners. A favorite featured “the figure of a man running, with another in pursuit, sticking him with an awl.” At the polling places, the Plug Uglies strapped awls to their knees, surrounded suspect voters and “awled” them into retreat. “Come up and vote; there is room for awl!”

Peter Fitzpatrick testified that he was kept in Plug Ugly Raz Levy’s coop, where he recalled that a fellow captive, a German immigrant “had a large beard, and Crab Ashby took a candle and . . . burnt it off.” In 1858, John Justus Ritzius recounted being forced to vote sixteen times in several wards. Given that a single coop might hold as many as ninety captives, the potential for inflating the turnout was prodigious. That year, independent mayoral candidate Colonel Schutt ran against Know Nothing incumbent Thomas Swann. Observing that attempts to vote for him promised “loss of life and the general disorder of the city,” the civic-minded Schutt made what is perhaps the earliest concession speech in American history, bowing out of the race at noon on Election Day.