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Democrat election fraud (view source)
Revision as of 04:36, November 29, 2020
, 04:36, November 29, 2020→1992
According to [[Wikipedia]], [[Bill Clinton]] engaged in [[voter suppression]] by appearing at several [[Massachusetts]] polling locations, which caused voters hours of delay and inhibited traffic.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2016/03/01/did-bill-clinton-violate-election-rules-venturing-into-polling-location/PH4FIH9jCKYKf6Fzyvfz2N/story.html</ref> Clinton was allegedly electioneering within 150 feet of the polling locations, which is also illegal according to Massachusetts state law.<ref>http://www.medfordma.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ELECTIONSummary.pdf</ref>
According to [[Wikipedia]], [[Bill Clinton]] engaged in [[voter suppression]] by appearing at several [[Massachusetts]] polling locations, which caused voters hours of delay and inhibited traffic.<ref>http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/2016/03/01/did-bill-clinton-violate-election-rules-venturing-into-polling-location/PH4FIH9jCKYKf6Fzyvfz2N/story.html</ref> Clinton was allegedly electioneering within 150 feet of the polling locations, which is also illegal according to Massachusetts state law.<ref>http://www.medfordma.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/ELECTIONSummary.pdf</ref>
==1960==
:{{See also|United States Presidential Election, 1960}}
==1948==
In 1948, [[Lyndon Johnson]], an obscure congressman opposed to [[President Harry Truman]]’s civil rights program and was a supporter of what he called “the anti-Communist Taft- Hartley labor bill,” was running for the Democratic Senate nomination in [[Texas]]. In those days obtaining the Democratic nomination was tantamount to winning the general election.
Johnson ran against the [[Dixiecrat]] governor Coke Stevenson and several others. When the returns were in, the popular Stevenson had 71,000 more votes than Johnson but he lacked a majority in the crowded field. This necessitated a runoff. In the runoff Johnson again trailed Stevenson.
George B. Parr, the Democratic boss of Duval County, Texas ruled three counties in southeast Texas — Duval, Jim Wells, and Zapata. This oil-rich brush country was an area inhabited largely by Mexican-Americans. Parr paid their poll taxes, got them jobs, was generous with gifts to their sick and needy, and used them to vote. Parr collected payoffs from construction companies doing business in his area, brothels, moonshine and gambling businesses. In 1936, he went to prison for income tax evasion.
Parr, who appeared in public surrounded by tough looking goons. It literally was suicide to oppose him. ''The New York Times'' reported, “Only Federal agents and Texas rangers ever successfully questioned his authority. Others who did took their lives in their hands. At least two men were shot to death by deputy sheriffs loyal to Parr.” Other brutal deaths were associated with him.
Parr favored Johnson in the 1948 runoff. Days after the polls had closed, a “correction” of the vote came in from Precinct 13 in the hamlet of Alice in Jim Wells County on the Mexican border. The “correction” gave Johnson 202 votes which local election officials claimed they had somehow previously overlooked. But it was enough to give Johnson the Democratic nomination by eighty-seven votes.
Coke Stevenson told reporters “I was beaten by a stuffed ballot box. And I can prove it.”
Parr laughed and called Stevenson a poor loser. “In previous elections the district has gone for Stevenson with as much enthusiasm as it has gone against him in this year’s Senate election. I never heard a complaint from him then about the bloc vote in Duval County,” Parr noted.
Charging fraud, the governor appealed to the federal court for redress. His lawyers produced evidence clearly demonstrating that “voters” from the graveyard and from across the border in Mexico had been recorded for Johnson. The lawyers also produced a couple of courageous Chicanos who testified that Parr had voted their names without their knowledge.
After hearing all the arguments. Judge T. Whitfield Davidson was moved to comment: “There has not one word of evidence been submitted [sic] to disprove this plaintiff’s claim he has been robbed of a seat in the [[United States Senate]].”
At the same time Davidson issued an injunction denying Johnson a place on the ballot.
As a result there was great consternation among leading Democrats in Washington. Not that the liberals or even Truman particularly loved Johnson. If anyone followed a Southern line, it was he. But they preferred Johnson to his outspoken Dixiecrat opponent. Which is precisely what Truman told Johnson when the President barnstormed through Texas late in September 1948.
Meanwhile Washington lawyer [[Abe Fortas]] took charge of the legal maneuvers to save Johnson’s “election.” In this he was assisted by none other than Joe Rauh, an ultra-liberal then most active in the affairs of [[Americans for Democratic Action]].
One day after Judge Davidson reopened his hearing in [[Fort Worth]], Fortas went to see Associate Justice [[Hugo Black]], a [[Ku Klux Klan]]sman-turned-civil libertarian. They spent considerable time discussing Johnson’s election problem.
On September 28, 1948, Black issued an order staying the Davidson injunction. This meant that Johnson’s name could appear on the November ballot. Black’s order declared that the federal courts lacked jurisdiction over state elections. In effect Black had ruled that Johnson would be the next senator from Texas.
Adjourning his court, an angered Judge Davidson denounced the Black order as “unduly hasty and probably unlawful” — which it was. The judge noted, for example, that the Stevenson-Johnson controversy had involved a federal office. Then he pointed out that only four years previously, Justice Black had voted exactly the opposite when the High Court ruled that federal courts could indeed interfere to see that African Americans were not barred from voting in Texas primaries.
The Democrat Senate voted to look into the contested primary. But Senate investigators soon discovered that most of the ballots in Duval, Jim Wells, and Zapata counties had been destroyed. According to George Parr, some illiterate Mexican janitors must have thought they were trash ready to be burned. The Senate probe was over before it began.
Meanwhile Truman was barnstorming Texas in what appeared to be a forlorn pursuit of the presidency. When his train stopped at San Antonio, Parr got aboard to spend a half-hour with the President. Immediately there was speculation that Parr would get a presidential pardon for an old income tax conviction.
Truman, of course, was no stranger to stuffed ballots. In fact he could never have become President if he had not scraped victory out of the 1934 Senate primary in [[Missouri]] with the help of 50,000 fraudulent votes from Tom Pendergast’s [[Kansas City]] machine. And years later when Boss Pendergast died, Truman flew to the funeral.
So pleased was Truman with Parr’s work, shortly after his election, he rewarded Parr with a pardon. And when Parr again was found guilty of income tax evasion, Abe Fortas argued the case all the way to the [[Supreme Court]] and got Parr off on a technical ruling.
Years later a grateful President Lyndon Johnson nominated Abe Fortas as a justice on the Supreme Court.
So exhilarated was Lyndon Johnson on reaching the political mountaintop in 1948 that, according to one biographer, he told this story about his first Senate victory:
{{quotebox-float|Little Manuel was sitting on a curbstone, crying bitter tears. Another Mexican, happening along, asked, “What’s the trouble with you, Manuel?”
“My father was here last Saturday and he did not come to see me.”
“But, Manuel, your father has been dead ten years.”
“That’s true,” Manuel sobbed. “But he was here last Saturday and he voted for Lyndon Johnson, but he did not even come to see me.”<ref>https://archive.org/details/LaskyVictorItDidntStartWithWatergate/page/n133/mode/2up?q=county</ref>}}
==See also==
==See also==