Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Two
“Swilling the Planters with Bumbo”
BY Susan Q. Stranahan | July 01, 2008
Election tampering has a rich history in the United States. So does vote buying. George Washington spent almost 40 pounds to supply more than 140 gallons of rum and beer to his supporters when he ran for the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758. Even so, according to historian Tracy Campbell, Washington worried that his campaign manager had “spent with too sparing a hand.” Apparently not; he won. In 1777, his fellow Virginian James Madison balked at “swilling the planters with bumbo.” He lost.
Decade after decade, era after era, starting even before the Revolution that converted 13 colonies into a nation, this sorry history has accumulated, largely ignored by schoolbooks and uncomfortable to acknowledge. Now, precisely two and a half centuries after George Washington plied colonial-era voters with rum, contemporary Democrats and Republicans have joined in an election campaign where no one spends “with too sparing a hand” — and contemporary citizens are left to contemplate the validity of this November’s election results.
The quadrennial election sideshow known as the “buying of the president” is gaining speed, with total spending by both parties projected to exceed $1 billion by the time polling places open on November 4. The parties, still harboring sulfurous suspicions of voter fraud and voter suppression in the chaotic 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, may face spending hundreds of thousands if not millions from their war chests on lawyers and other battlements to protect against democracy-weakening ballot chicanery by their opponents.
In the annals of election excess and scandal, the 2000 and 2004 elections are worthy of note but pale in comparison to the outright corruption documented in earlier presidential elections.
The 1828 presidential race was the first to hit the $1 million mark in campaign spending — and registered the first recorded instance of ballot fraud. Four years earlier, Andrew Jackson, the rough-edged war hero, had been pitted against political veterans Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams. Jackson won a plurality of the popular vote and more electoral votes than his rivals. But because the Constitution requires a majority of electoral votes, and Jackson had only a plurality, the outcome was decided in the House of Representatives — which chose Adams. As a result of the defeat, political fervor was running high on behalf of Jackson in 1828. Old Hickory’s supporters delivered a total of 647,286 votes for their candidate, nearly double the total votes cast four years earlier. They were so eager to finally get their man into the White House that some supporters from Jackson’s home state of Tennessee crossed over into Kentucky and Ohio and also voted there for good measure.
By the mid-19th century, one of America’s legendary political machines was delivering votes — and largesse — in New York City. Under the leadership of William M. “Boss” Tweed, Tammany Hall operated to a great degree as a shadow government. Tammany Hall could turn out votes, and voters, on call. In an 1844 election in a city with 41,000 registered voters, 55,000 ballots were cast.
But Boss Tweed labored under no delusions about what it took to win. “The ballots didn’t make the outcome,” he explained, “the counters did.”
It was the 1876 election that gave Boss Tweed’s motto new meaning. Ulysses Grant had served two terms, remarkable for their corruption. America was in the throes of an economic depression. With neither party fielding an incumbent, the race was deemed to be wide open. The Republicans nominated Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes. New York Governor Samuel Tilden won the nod from the Democrats.
Tamany Hall’s William Marcy “Boss” Tweed (Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-22467)As the votes were tallied, Tilden appeared to hold a 250,000-vote lead and 184 electoral votes, one less than needed to send him to the White House. But the Republicans weren’t ready to concede, knowing that they controlled election boards in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana that would certify the final tallies in those states. If Hayes took the popular vote in those three states, their 19 electoral votes would send him to the White House. At the request of Republican leaders in Washington, the count was held up. It was doubtful that the Republicans could deliver the necessary popular groundswell, at least by an honest count. In the years after the Civil War, the party had become moribund in many areas of the South, thanks in large part to threats and intimidation by Democrats of Republican voters, many of them newly enfranchised freed slaves. In a free and fair election, the Republicans might have had a chance to carry several of the Southern states, but the Democrats were successful in suppressing Republican votes.
In Florida, Hayes led Tilden by a mere 40 votes. The Democrats cried foul, accusing the Republicans of purging voter lists, excluding Democratic votes, and padding vote totals on Hayes’s behalf. In the end, neither side trusted the other to accurately count the Florida vote. The nation waited as the controversy worsened and the prospect of violence grew. There was even talk of another civil war. President Grant sent troops to Florida to maintain order and threatened martial law. The Democrats threatened him with impeachment. In Louisiana, Tilden led Hayes by 6,300 votes — until the canvassing boards (dominated by Republicans) investigated claims of intimidation and outright threats against voters. In early December, the board threw out returns from two parishes, handing Hayes a majority.
The Constitution provided little guidance on how to resolve the impasse: It provided that the president of the Senate should count the electoral votes before a joint session of Congress, but did not specify who would decide disputed results. As the weeks ticked by, the sparring parties in Congress finally agreed on a compromise: A special electoral commission would decide the outcome. The commission would consist of 15 members, 10 from Congress (five from each party), and five members of the Supreme Court (two Democrats and two Republicans, who would then select the final justice to serve). But the politicking was far from over. A Republican Supreme Court justice widely believed to favor Tilden resigned the bench to take a seat in the U.S. Senate. Taking his place was another Republican, who gave party loyalty a higher priority. In the end, the commission awarded the disputed electoral votes to Hayes, who defeated Tilden by one vote. Among Democrats, the 19th president of the United States became known as “Rutherfraud B. Hayes” or “His Fraudulency.”
Scholars continue to debate who actually won (most favor Tilden). But historian Tracy Campbell writes in Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition 1742-2004:
The real story of 1876 goes beyond these immediate concerns. It was the culmination of over a decade’s worth of election corruption where both parties saw each other as deliberately stealing elections. The point had been reached long before where honest accounts of the popular will were the farthest things from anyone’s mind.
Twelve years later, things had not improved. The election of 1888 pitted President Grover Cleveland against Republican Benjamin Harrison. Harrison lost the popular vote by more than 90,000 but won a majority in the Electoral College. (The next time a president was elected without winning the popular vote was 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court decided the outcome in favor of George W. Bush.) The victory was due in part to Harrison curiously carrying New York, President Cleveland’s home state. That prompted the national Republican Party chairman Matthew Quay to observe that Harrison never knew “how close a number of men were compelled to approach the gates of the penitentiary to make him president.”
By the late 1880s, many believed corrupt elections could be eliminated with the use of a secret, uniform ballot. Until then, political parties issued their own, clearly identifiable ballots. So urgent was the need to restore public faith in the electoral process that states rapidly embraced the idea. (The major parties also realized that they would save the expense of printing ballots, and that smaller third parties would be disadvantaged in some ways by the change.) By the 1892 presidential election, three-quarters of the states had adopted the so-called “Australian” ballot, named for the country of its origin. Mechanical voting machines were also just beginning to come into use. Thomas Edison had invented a mechanical voting machine after the Civil War, but it never became popular. In 1895, Samuel Shoup — whose other claim to fame was the invention of the paper napkin dispenser — advertised a mechanical voting machine, claiming it was tamper proof. (With 27,000 moving parts, it wasn’t.) Another machine was touted by its inventor as able to “protect mechanically the voter from rascaldom.” More likely, it simply changed the way the rascals worked.