The allegations that the November 8 election will be rigged raise the question: were any other presidential elections stolen?
1960: Did Chicago’s Mayor Rig The Vote For Kennedy?
The 1960 election was too close to call at midnight on the East Coast. The vote was especially close in two states: Illinois and Texas. There were allegations that Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine stuffed ballot boxes with fraudulent votes for Kennedy. After all, Chicago is where folks “vote early and often.” When the Illinois count was complete, Kennedy won by 9,000 votes. There were similar allegations in Texas, the home of Democratic vice presidential candidate Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy won Texas by 46,000 votes.
Nixon’s supporters urged him to challenge the count. If he actually had won Texas and Illinois, he would have had the 270 electoral votes to beat Kennedy. But Nixon, known since 1950 as “Tricky Dick” for his campaign tactics, refused, saying:
“Our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis.”
Our country is in serious trouble when we’re nostalgic for the decency of Richard Nixon.
2000: Counting The Vote In Florida
There were plenty of reasons to think that someone tried to rig the election in Florida. In 1999, Governor Jeb Bush’s administration contracted with DBT Online to purge the rolls of duplicate registrations, deceased voters, and of convicted felons who were not legally permitted to vote. An investigation into Florida’s voting irregularities by the the United States Commission on Civil Rights revealed that state officials had purged a disproportionate number of Black voters from the rolls. After a preliminary search through the list, DBT Online informed state officials that the results contained too many “false positives” — people whose names were similar to those of deceased voters or convicted felons. It recommended ways to make the search more precise, which would produce fewer false positives. But state officials chose to use this list as it was, and the list included a high number of Black and Hispanic voters. Black people were more likely to vote for Democrats. Some of the Hispanic population (e.g., Cubans) were strongly Republican while others were not. In other words, Republican state officials made decisions that resulted in the incorrect removal of many voters from the rolls, and a disproportionate number of Black citizens were barred from voting.
Law enforcement officials in some counties set up checkpoints at which drivers were stopped, purportedly to make sure their vehicles met state requirements. The Civil Rights Commission investigated these allegations and found that law enforcement officers set up checkpoints without authorization by any state official. Again, a disproportionate number of Black voters were prevented from voting.
Florida’s Butterfly Ballot
Palm Beach County designed a ballot that was confusing because the names of candidates for the same office appeared on both the left and right sides of the page. Voters were to select their candidate and punch a hole in a column in the center of the ballot.
Pat Buchanan was running on the Reform Party ticket. As you can see, his name was on the right, and a vote for him was to be made by punching through the hole in the card that was directly under that of George W. Bush. Al Gore’s name appeared directly under Bush’s, but a vote for him had to be cast by punching the third hole.
Political scientists have found that the vote for Buchanan was inordinately high in Palm Beach County. In fact, voters who cast absentee ballots voted for Buchanan in the same proportion as the polls showed. Pat Buchanan got 3,407 votes in this liberal Democratic county — 2,800 more than would be expected if the results had mirrored those of the absentee voters, who did not use a butterfly ballot.
The biggest differences between the 2000 election and 2016? The gap between the totals for Bush and Gore was extremely close — 537 out of 5.8 million votes cast — and Florida law required a recount. Nobody complained in advance about a rigged election. And it’s also noteworthy that the Republicans were the only ones who made deliberate decisions that suppressed the minority vote. The butterfly ballot was designed by a Democrat.
