2005-03-02

Voter fraud and the Democratic Party

Those interested in fair and honest elections can only note with disgust
the opposition in the Democratic Party,
and their allies in the nation's editorial boards,
to requiring photo IDs to vote.
But in fact, this only continues a long and sordid history
of voter fraud used by Democrats to win elections.
A notable example was the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race.
For a brief account, consider this paragraph from a History News Network article:
Scholarly analysis of the question of how Kennedy won
has focused, quite rightly, on administration of the electoral process
in two crucial states: Illinois and Texas.
Kennedy ultimately was credited with the electoral votes of both,
which gave him victory in the Electoral College tally.
The problem with answering the question of how he prevailed there
is twofold in nature.
In Illinois, the most recent and fair-minded study
(Kallina’s Kennedy v. Nixon)
concludes that sufficient evidence does not exist
to determine whether Chicago’s Democratic machine stole more votes there
than Republicans did downstate.
Texas presents a different kind of problem.
A system of free and fair elections in the modern sense
had not yet taken hold on the ground there in 1960.
Voter fraud was fairly common, safeguards to prevent it were few,
and 1960 was no different in those respects.
Thus, the most dispassionate analysis of this issue from the perspective of fifty years later is that
we will never know whether Kennedy really “won,”
in the sense of what result an entirely honest and effective administration of the electoral process in Illinois and Texas
would have produced on Election Day in 1960.

For an example in a Democratic Party primary,
see this account of Lyndon Johnson's 1948 Democratic primary victory.

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