Long ago, an election was stolen.
It was stolen in a place that was effectively a one-party state at the time. Oh, yes, there was technically political opposition. But as a practical matter, the ruling party called the shots; its candidates always won. Elections were largely a formality, held for show.
But elections were held nonetheless. The standard tricks of the trade were used to affect their outcome: votes recorded that were not cast, dead people voting, bought votes, fraudulent totals – you name it.
However, sometimes the ruling party would squabble within itself, with no clearly “pre-anointed” victor. In those cases, the results might be close. And things could get . . . interesting.
In one such case, the results were close indeed. After a hard fight, one of the two indeed won. Then the election was stolen. And the results were so obviously fraudulent as to be nauseating.
In one location, dead people were documented to have voted. People who never voted during the election – and who were out of town on election day and thus unable to vote at all – were nevertheless counted as having voted in person.
The totals in favor of one candidate were nauseatingly one-sided – so much so, that it’s impossible to believe them: 408-110; 5,554 -1,179; 965-61 (or 966-61; sources differ); 711-158; 723-198; 2,908-166; and 4,195-38 (later “amended” to 4,620-40 – or an election “turnout” of 99.6% of registered voters in that locality).
All told, it’s estimated that tens of thousands of outright fraudulent votes were cast. They were overwhelmingly cast for one candidate. And when that wasn’t enough, days after the election one key result was “corrected”; enough names were added – alphabetically and in the same handwriting – to official poll lists as having voted for a single candidate to change the election’s results. Barely.
In short, the election was blatantly stolen. And though challenged, the challenge was unsuccessful. The beneficiary of the theft ended up keeping the stolen office – a high national office, at that.
Now, you might wonder why I’m writing this and posting it to a military blog. Well, the above is indeed true. But it’s not a story about fraudulent elections in some Third-World dictatorship or Communist nation during the Cold War – nations that were known to hold elections merely for show.
I’m also not talking about the 2008 Minnesota Senate Election that was stolen to put Al “Comic Relief” Franken in the Senate.
Rather, it’s the story of what happened in South Texas during the 1948 Democratic Senate Primary Run-Off election. That election was patently fraudulent – and blatently stolen.
That’s the election that sent LBJ to the Senate, saving his political career and setting him on the path to the White House.
Without that stolen election, LBJ isn’t Vice-President on the morning of November 22, 1963. And without LBJ as president, IMO Vietnam as a major land war either never happens at all or plays out far differently than it did. LBJ was terrified of being identified as being “soft” on Communism, and identified as having “lost” a nation to the Communist cause. IMO that’s the main reason he engineered our involvement there – and kept “upping the ante” when things didn’t go as planned.
If you’ve never read Robert A. Caro’s Means of Ascent, I’d strongly recommend you do so while you’re on this side of the dirt – regardless of your feelings about LBJ. In Chapters 13-16, Caro documents precisely how people working on LBJ’s behalf stole that election, and how they kept it stolen afterwards. And he makes a persuasive case that not only did LBJ know precisely what was going on, but also approved of it wholeheartedly.
Elections have consequences. Sometimes they’re not felt for decades.
Author’s Note: None of the ballot boxes produced in court during Federal Special Master Hearings investigating allegations of fraud during the 1948 Texas Senatorial Run-Off Election in late September 1948 were marked as was the one in the above photo. The ballot box depicted in the photo above was thus quite obviously not among those produced in court during that Federal Special Master investigation.
The box in the photo is believed to have been from Precinct 13 in Alice, TX, in Jim Wells County. That precinct was the one to which the 200 votes (some accounts say 201 or 202) that changed the election’s outcome were added days after-the-fact.
The individuals in the photo are known associates and political allies of George B. Parr, political Jefe of the local area. One of them is his cousin, Givens Parr.
Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County is known to have had two ballot boxes. Both were ordered brought to court during the Special Master investigation.
One box from Precinct 13 was indeed opened in court during the Special Master hearings. The second ballot box from Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County was either among those that remained unopened when the investigation was ordered halted – or was not present in court that day.
The ballot box in the photo above has never been located.
LBJ himself is known to have possessed a copy of the above photo. On at least one occasion during his Presidency, showed his copy of that photo to a journalist during an interview(1967).
Draw whatever conclusions from the above you desire.