Broken Elections, Stolen Votes – Part Two (cont.)
In 1896 America was about to experience a presidential campaign by the first modern political kingmaker, Mark Hanna. (Karl Rove, the political adviser President Bush called “the architect” of his own ascendancy to the White House, has often compared himself to Hanna.) Hanna, a Cleveland coal and iron magnate, befriended his fellow Ohioan, William McKinley, and put in place a campaign organization that raised a stunning $3.5 million, much of it from industrialists and corporations. Hanna paid more than a thousand campaign workers to fan out across the country to distribute campaign literature. At one point, he was spending $600,000 a week on postage in what would today be known as a direct mail campaign. As a result, the Hanna-McKinley team effectively undermined — and vastly outspent — the grassroots campaign mounted by Democrat William Jennings Bryan. Like Boss Tweed, Hanna had his own take on the democratic process, saying, “All questions of government in a democracy are questions of money.” The “buying of the president” is hardly a recent development.
What has been called “perhaps the most infamous case of election fraud in 20th-century America” took place in the tiny south Texas town of Alice. In 1941, a young Lyndon Baines Johnson ran for the U.S. Senate as a Roosevelt Democrat, challenging Governor W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits, Pappy” O’Daniel. Although the underdog, Johnson pulled ahead on election night with 5,000 votes and was declared the unofficial winner by the Texas Election Bureau. Once the size of Johnson’s lead became known, however, the O’Daniel camp sprang into action. As Johnson and his campaign manager John Connally watched in dismay, their lead vanished as revised totals from east and south Texas were reported. In the end, Johnson lost by 1,311 votes.
Another narrow win: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson carried Illinois by less than 9,000 votes (John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)Determined not to be ambushed next time around, Johnson “grabbed for money as greedily as he had grabbed for power,” according to biographer Robert A. Caro. By the time he announced another Senate run in 1948, he had amassed a personal fortune of over $1 million. And he had gained some extraordinarily powerful backers, including the construction firm Brown & Root, which funneled cash directly to the Johnson campaign. So much cash was flowing into the campaign that Connally had to carry it in a “brown paper sack like you buy groceries in,” as an aide to Connally told Caro. Brown & Root (which later merged into Halliburton, whose CEO would eventually be Dick Cheney before he became vice president) provided Johnson a plane and stays at its private hunting camp.
Johnson’s opponent for the Senate again was a popular governor, Coke Stevenson, known as the “Cowboy Governor,” who was considered invincible. Initially, Stevenson held a two-to-one lead, but Johnson barnstormed the state in a two-seat helicopter (provided by Bell Aerospace Corporation) that people called the “Johnson City Windmill.”
Three days after the polls closed, the returns were still filtering in. Stevenson held a slim lead. Johnson knew the outcome hinged on George Parr, the “Duke of Duval County,” who controlled the votes of south Texas. (Parr had a firm rule: Never report your vote totals until your opponent has revealed his. It was Parr who had withheld the totals seven years earlier when he backed Johnson’s opponent O’Daniel.) Six days after the election, in the town of Alice, an additional 202 votes were reported from Precinct Box 13. All but two were for Johnson. By some accounts, the names of these newly tallied voters were listed in alphabetical order — and their signatures were all in the same ink. Johnson won the Senate election by 87 votes, earning him the nickname “Landslide Lyndon.”
George Parr’s rule about being the last to report returns served Johnson well in another race. The year was 1960 and the Democratic ticket, led by John F. Kennedy with Johnson as his running mate, was in a tight battle with Republican Richard Nixon. Illinois was crucial to a Democratic win. The powerful political machine of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was poised to provide it. Kennedy needed a wide margin from Democratic Cook County to offset the downstate vote. Daley, like Parr, knew the value of an ace up his sleeve. On election night, returns from 200 Chicago precincts were not reported until the results from elsewhere around Illinois had been posted. Finally, the numbers were announced. In Daley’s own ward, Kennedy had won by 14,000 votes; he received a 450,000-vote margin in Cook County, and carried Illinois by less than 9,000 votes.
Republicans cried fraud in Illinois, and also in Texas. Wherever paper ballots were used in Texas, voters had to cross out all names except the candidate to be elected. During the count, many ballots, deemed to be improperly marked, were discarded. Lawyers went to court, arguing that thousands of voters had been denied their right to vote when their ballots were summarily rejected.
On December 12, 1960, courts in both Illinois and Texas ordered an end to the recounts. Forty years later to the day, the U.S. Supreme Court would order a halt to the recount of votes in Florida, ushering George W. Bush into the Oval Office.
Read the series:
Part One: A difficult problem to quantify
Part Two: “Swilling the Planters with Bumbo”
Part Three: The strange story of Florida’s 2000 election
Part Four: A second messy election: Ohio 2004
Part Five: What impedes election reform efforts
Listen to or download the podcast
Sarah Laskow contributed reporting to this story.
Susan Q. Stranahan is a freelance journalist. For 28 years, she was a staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered environment, business, and the courts. Her stories were a major component of The Inquirer’s coverage of the Three Mile Island accident, which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting. Stranahan is the author of Susquehanna, River of Dreams, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, and has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Fortune, Mother Jones, and Time. She lives in Narberth, Pennsylvania.
SOURCES: Tracy Campbell, Deliver the Vote: The History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition – 1724-2004 (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers), 2005; Paul Leicester Ford, The True George Washington (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company), 1896; President Elect 1824; “Finding Precedent: Hayes vs. Tilden, The Electoral College Controversy of 1876-1877,” HarpWeek; President Elect 1888; “1888 Presidential Election Results,” David Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections; Todd S. Purdum, “Machine Politics,” The New York Times, November 1, 1992; “Special Report: What Happened in Florida Is the Rule and Not the Exception,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2000; Brian Naylor, “Karl Rove, ‘The Architect,’ Returns Home,” National Public Radio, August 14, 2007; Nicholas Lemann, “Rovian Ways,” The New Yorker, August 27, 2007; Mark Hanna, Encyclopedia Britannica; LBJ, program transcript, American Experience: The Presidents, PBS; Robert A. Caro, Means of Ascent, The Years of Lyndon Johnson Vol. 2 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.), 1990; About KBR, KBR, Inc.; Ronnie Dugger, The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson (W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.), 1984; Lori Perez, “The 200 Presidential Election, Postelection Contest: A Chronology.”