D. C. Bear said:
historian said:
Votes by the desc has been very popular for the Dems for about a century. It helped LBJ when a senate seat in the 1940s and it helped JFK & LBJ win in 1960. Those are well documented instances but there are plenty of others.
There's an old joke about a kid running through town shouting "My daddy's alive! My daddy's alive!"
Shopkeeper yells at him, "Boy, what's wrong with you? You know your daddy died when you were a baby and is buried in the cemetery right outside town!"
Kid shouts back, "He's alive and just voted for Lyndon Johnson!"
The dead father probably voted for JFK as well.
[
arguments persist to this day about vote-counting in two states, specifically Illinois (where Kennedy won by 9,000 votes) and Texas (where Kennedy won by 46,000 votes). If Nixon had won those two states, he would have defeated Kennedy by two votes in the Electoral College.
That fact wasn't lost on Nixon's supporters, who urged the candidate to contest the results. At the time, Kennedy was also leading in the critical state of California, which was Nixon's home state. But a count of absentee ballots gave Nixon the state several weeks later, after he conceded it to Kennedy.
In Illinois, there were rampant rumors that Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley used his political machine to stuff the ballot box in Cook County. Democrats charged the GOP with similar tactics in southern Illinois. Down in Texas, there were similar claims about the influence of Kennedy's running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, over that state's election.
On Wednesday afternoon, November 9, 1960, Nixon officially conceded the election to Kennedy. He told his friend, journalist Earl Mazo, that "our country cannot afford the agony of a constitutional crisis." (Mazo had written a series of articles about voter fraud after the 1960 election, which he stopped at Nixon's request.)
In later years, Nixon also claimed in an autobiography that widespread fraud happened in Illinois and Texas during the 1960 election.]