Election Fraud Boosted Future Presidents. Now It Barely Exists.

Booze, bribery, beatings — all were just part of another election day, in a town or city picked at random, in the times of Colonial and pre-Civil War America.

George Washington, that eventual model of presidential restraint and dignity, spent a significant sum (several thousand dollars in today’s money) on stocking voters with liquor so as to secure their support in his election to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1758, a practice that the colony soon outlawed. Not that a ban was practical to enforce. Bensel documented the prevalence of this tactic of “treating” in other jurisdictions long after. “Whisky, it seems, bought as many, and perhaps far more, votes than the planks in party platforms,” he wrote.

Party bosses and other powerful men could exploit human weakness and socioeconomic gaps with other bribes, of cash and clothing, to secure votes, including from aliens in many places. Physical intimidation and violence at voting locations were common. “[A]lthough popular voting is the quintessential characteristic of a democratic political system, the polling place, in nineteenth-century America, was often one of the less democratic sites in the nation,” argued Bensel.

Campbell, the University of Kentucky historian, established a rule of thumb that remains relevant today: “The smaller the election, the easier it is to steal. Local elections are easier to corrupt than state elections; state elections are easier to corrupt than national ones.” In early America, however, the latter were still plenty exposed. James K. Polk, the 11th president, won decisive states in the 1844 election by narrow margins that critics attributed — with the context of an enabling culture and strong anecdotal evidence on their side — to the dirty tactics of the day: “padding voter lists with illegal immigrants; buying votes with liquor or cash; and stuffing ballot boxes with impunity.” In Louisiana, Campbell wrote that local Democrats organized to bring in voters from other parishes — an approach that was taken at larger scale amid Bleeding Kansas.

Anti-slavery people from the Northeast and pro-slavery Missourians alike traveled there. The latter rallied to influence Kansas’s selection of its first delegate to the U.S. Congress in 1854 — an effort that resulted in Congress vacating the seat nearly two years later. “[A] systematic invasion from an adjoining State, by which large numbers of illegal votes were cast in remote and sparse settlements, for the avowed purpose of extending slavery into the Territory, even though it did not change the result of the election, was a crime of great magnitude,” a congressional report delivered by Michigan representative William A. Howard read.

It was often the case that local “political machines” organized and abetted vote-rigging strategies. The most infamous in the 19th century was Tammany Hall in New York City, run by William M. “Boss” Tweed. It was able to control who voted and how often, and ensure friendly judges naturalized new immigrants by the thousands in a single season before elections: “In 1868 alone, over 65,000 people were naturalized in the courtrooms controlled by Tammany,” Campbell wrote.

“Was the election [that year] fair? Tweed later admitted that ‘I don’t think there was ever a fair and honest election in New York City.’”

Tweed’s undoing, however, began in 1871, when The New York Times published several accounts of Tammany’s abuses. And Thomas Nast's cartoons in Harper's Weekly turned numbers about the money it stole into images that even non-readers could follow, which touched a nerve with the ringleader.

While machine politics, including Tammany’s, continued into the 20th century, Tweed’s downfall became a useful foil for political reformers in the years ahead, and coincided with arguably the nadir of election fraud at the presidential level.

The 1876 general election between Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican, and New York governor Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, has been studied in recent years as part of resolving a presidential contest whose results are in dispute. “While the story of how the contest was decided in the weeks and months after the votes were cast has been exhaustively covered,” however, Campbell wrote — in a book published in 2005, mind you — “the role of fraud in the election itself has tended to be obscured.” In his view, the election of 1876 “was the culmination of over a decade’s worth of election corruption where both parties saw each other as deliberately stealing elections.”

From the Republican point of view, Democratic efforts to disenfranchise Republican supporters in the South, especially black voters, made politics unrepresentative of the sum will of the people. From the Democratic point of view, enfranchisement of former slaves was corrupt in itself — it was more about increasing Republican political power than it was a matter of justice.

In 1876, these theories of the case were tested to the max. Republicans accused, accurately, Democrats of disenfranchising Republican voters in Florida and Louisiana, and of cooking vote totals in their favor. Democrats accused, accurately, Republicans of post-election maneuvers during vote canvassing to diminish Democratic votes in those states, as well as in South Carolina. In the end, Hayes became president. But “[it] was not that the Democrats were innocent victims who had a free and fair election stolen from under their noses,” Campbell wrote: “rather, they did not have the muscle or the skill of their Republican counterparts when and where it mattered most.”

These battles in the South presaged the arrival of Jim Crow. No story about election fraud is sufficient without at least mentioning it — not because it was the next step, but because its designers regarded it as a remedy. As a University of Alabama Law brief reads:

“In the late 1890s, after overcoming serious challenges to their power, Alabama Democratic politicians decided to take decisive action. They had used various illegal tactics — chiefly ballot-box stuffing — to defeat ‘fusionist’ coalitions of agrarians, Populists, and Republicans. They had won the elections; they remained in power. But in the process their exercise of power had lost any claim to a basis in morality. In order to prevent future challenges (and to shield themselves from the temptation to cheat), they decided to follow a plan first carried out in Mississippi in 1890 and since perfected in other southern states. The plan’s chief feature was the adoption of a new constitution, one whose voter registration provisions would disfranchise large numbers of citizens. African American voters were the primary targets; but significant numbers of hill country white voters were likewise vulnerable.”

Campbell cited before-and-after voter registration statistics to make that exact point in Louisiana. In 1897, there were 164,088 registered white voters and 130,344 registered black voters. In 1900, those numbers had declined to 125,437 and 5,320, respectively.

Although election chicanery in the South continued, the machine politics whose traits are of most concern to Americans with doubts about elections today were practiced regardless of Civil War geography. The former border state of Missouri, Confederate state of Texas, and Union state of Illinois alike were infamous for machinations that helped produce American presidents. Chronologically, the first of these was in Kansas City, and involved a boss named Tom Pendergast and his protégé Harry S. Truman.

For nearly a decade and a half, Pendergast “dictated the terms of day-to-day business in the city, including the operations of the police department, judicial appointments, elections officials, parks and recreation, and roads,” wrote the Missouri historian and Pendergast expert Jason Roe. Not mentioned but certainly counting were elections themselves. “The 1934 primary election in Kansas City had been so violent that it became known as the ‘Bloody Election,’” an FBI look-back at its investigations of Pendergast’s machine reads, “with thugs … committing acts of violence and intimidation against opponents and voters across the city. The fraudulent reporting of election results was even more damaging to the democratic process — precincts returned astronomical participation rates.”

One participant in that election was Truman, Kansas City’s man, who sought a Senate seat against a St. Louis-machine backed candidate, John Cochran — and, ironically, a candidate, Rep. Jacob Milligan, whose brother Maurice later successfully prosecuted Missouri election fraud. The three ran neck-and-neck outside the two major cities, with Truman edging Milligan by 6,000 votes and ahead of Cochran by 21,000. But in St. Louis, Cochran ran 111,000 votes ahead of second place, and in K.C., Truman ran 129,000 ahead. Pendergast’s operation was busted for fraud in the election two years later; it was credited for manufacturing tens of thousands of “ghost” votes, from the likes of the dead and people whose names were attached to empty lots and vacant buildings.

The Democratic machine in Texas that helped Lyndon Johnson to the Senate hardly needs an introduction, but Campbell provides an eye-popping one: “In Jim Wells and Duval counties, bosses ruled in ways that would have humbled Tom Pendergast.” The one who delivered LBJ his political future was George Parr, along with his henchman, Jim Wells County election judge Luis “Indio” Salas.

“Johnson did not win the election; It was stolen for him. And I know exactly how it was done,” Salas told the AP in 1977, for a story in which he detailed the conspiracy.

The short of it is that Johnson faced former Gov. Coke Stevenson in a runoff to determine the Democratic nominee for Senate in 1948. During the initial, three-way primary, Stevenson won 40 percent of the vote, and Johnson 34. Johnson’s private polling had found him gaining on Stevenson in advance of the runoff, but his momentum stalled during the final week-plus.

“Campaigning was no good any more. We had to pick up some votes,” a legal ally of Johnson’s, Ed Clark, told Caro for his book, “Means of Ascent.” That meant securing the support of “ethnic” blocs, including Mexican-Americans, at whatever financial cost. Salas recalled Parr telling him: “Luis, do not hesitate. Spend all the money necessary, but we have to have Johnson elected.”

Thanks to a combination of smart politics (Johnson dividing Stevenson’s conservative base with accusations about his stance on labor) and dirty politics, Johnson’s actual deficit the morning after Election Day was just 854 votes. Six days later, after the production and/or manufacturing of more Johnson votes in counties with margins befitting a dictator, it had shrunk to 113. Salas’s precinct in Jim Wells County provided the final push. “The figure [there] 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,’” Caro wrote. “Johnson had 200 more votes.”

Salas got away with it, talking to the press three decades after the fact to seek “peace of mind.” Because of the Chicago Tribune, dozens of cogs in Richard J. Daley’s machine did not.

In 1972, the paper assigned 26 reporters, some to serve as election judges and poll watchers, and a pivotal one to gain employment as a clerk for the city election board, to investigate the machine’s practices. “There was ghost voting, there were threats, there were irregularities. The identities of voters were not checked. The precinct captains ran everything,” a description of its yearlong investigative reporting reads. “There was campaigning in the polling place, party workers went into the voting booths with voters and tampered with the voting machines — all in violation of the law.”

The reporter who secured access as a clerk was able to secure documentary proof for many of these experiences and allegations. The work was published and also referred to federal prosecutors. The Tribune won a Pulitzer; several dozen indictments and at least 30 sentences for fraud followed; and the machine was clanging and slowing.

“This city, ruled from its beginnings by an interlocking alliance of businessmen, politicians and hoodlums so intricate that their roles shade into one another, once again is facing the possibility of a wave of reform,” a New York Times analysis from December 1972 begins. “And while few here would discount the resources of power at the command of Mayor Richard J. Daley, there are serious signs pointing to the political deterioration of the Cook County Democratic organization, the last and most famous of the big‐city machines.”

Leaping a half-century into the future and saying that all is now well could appear to wipe away, like a magic swipe of an eraser across a full whiteboard, a 200-year story of pure power surmounting idealistic fairness. But to carry the imagery forward: The writing on the wall was fading as of the 1970s and after. The Times’s observation about the last vestige of machine politics in Chicago was indicative of election fraud widely.

Consider: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton all won consecutive presidential elections that we would properly consider “landslides” today, unlike the closely divided popular and Electoral College votes that have characterized most of the races this century. In the 80s and 90s, the rationale for political machines, including socioeconomic divisions and the allure of patronage in hard economic times, was disappearing. A well-resourced, abundant, vigilant, and independent press was making their schemes more difficult to get away with, regardless. At both the national and local levels, what made election fraud “a thing” in the 19th and first two-thirds of the 20th centuries was no longer a significant part of politics.

The Florida recount of 2000 was a reminder of the stress and controversy of close election results and partisan election administration. But it happened at a time of digital technological development and prompted a law, the Help America Vote Act, which provided funds for modernizing election administration and established standards for voter list maintenance.

We now live in a country in which 96 percent of voters live in jurisdictions with hand-marked or printable ballots that they can inspect and confirm before submitting; in which ballot scanners and verifiable voter rolls have preempted possibilities for fudging in-person voting numbers; and in which list maintenance practices, ballot tracking and verification and storage, and the widespread adoption of post-election audits have provided extra layers of assurance for accurate vote counts, regardless of ballot type.

All this goes without mentioning the investigative resources at the federal government’s disposal, which arose in part from the Watergate and Civil Rights Eras. Some of those resources, such as the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Unit, have been drawn back during the Trump era; and new ones, such as the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm, have been put on elections, specifically noncitizen voting.

With all these developments in society, administrative practice, and law, which together form strong deterrents and a security net, the incidence and impact of election fraud today are negligible, as tracked by sources such as Declare and the Heritage Foundation. In identifying why, it helps to consider the times when that was not the case.