US has long history of rigged elections
https://themilitant.com/2021/01/23/us-has-long-history-of-rigged-elections/
BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
Vol. 85/No. 4
February 1, 2021
Liberal media and Democrats sneer at claims of chicanery in the 2020
elections. But stealing the vote and rigging elections is not new in
U.S. capitalist politics. The Democrats often led the way over the decades.
In the 1960 presidential election Democrat John F. Kennedy defeated
Republican Richard Nixon by the narrowest of margins. Vote stuffing by
the Democratic Party machine in Chicago led by Mayor Richard Daley gave
Kennedy the victory.
Kennedy beat Nixon by 9,000 votes in Illinois by capturing a
suspiciously high 450,000 advantage in Cook County, which covers
Chicago. How was this done? It included cornering the graveyard vote;
promising individuals money, a warm meal or a drink if they’d vote for
the “right” person; and precinct captains marking up ballots for people
to turn in. This was widely known, and described in detail by retired
journalist Bob Crawford, who covered Chicago politics for decades for
WBBM radio, in a 2016 interview.
“There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered
and voted,” Earl Mazo, a reporter visiting Chicago during the 1960
election, told the Washington Post. “I remember a house. It was
completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for
Kennedy in that house.”
Daley’s efforts at invention were more successful than Republican
efforts in southern parts of the state.
Lyndon B. Johnson, who won the presidential election in 1964, got
started in U.S. national politics by rigging the Democratic primary vote
that resulted in him winning a U.S. Senate seat from Texas in 1948. In a
chapter entitled “The Stealing,” biographer Robert Caro described how
Johnson got elected in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent.
A day after the polls closed, former Texas Gov. Coke Stevenson was
leading Johnson by about 800 votes. But reports of “uncounted votes”
from county election officials, like 427 in Duval County in the Rio
Grande Valley — 425 of which were for Johnson — narrowed the gap. Five
days later more ballots for Johnson were “found,” cutting Stevenson’s
lead to 157 votes.
In Jim Wells County among those voting for Johnson were 200 names in
alphabetical order in the same handwriting. On tally sheets submitted by
election officials in Precinct 13 there, Caro writes, “The figure for
Johnson, which had been reported as 765 on Election Night, was now 965 —
because, according to testimony that would later be given, someone had,
since Election Night, added a loop to the ‘7’ to change it into a ‘9.’”
Johnson was now on the road to his Senate seat.
The Democrats — with help from political allies in the FBI — tried
mightily for over four years to drive President Trump from office on
fabricated charges he colluded with Moscow.
The best example of election rigging, of course, is the way the
capitalist rulers of both parties seek to suppress ballot access for
working-class candidates and parties like the Socialist Workers Party.
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US has long history of rigged elections
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George H. Smith “It is my firm conviction that man has nothing to gain,
emotionally or otherwise, by adhering to a falsehood, regardless of how
comfortable or sacred that falsehood may appear. Anyone who claims, on
the one hand, that he is concerned with human welfare, and who demands,
on the other hand, that man must suspend or renounce the use of his
reason, is contradicting himself. There can be no knowledge of what is
good for man apart from knowledge of reality and human nature, and there
is no manner in which this knowledge can be acquired except through
reason. To advocate irrationality is to advocate that which is
destructive to human life.” ― George H. Smith, Atheism: The Case Against God
