The Bible says there’s nothing new under the sun. That certainly applies to voter fraud in American politics.
The commonly parroted talking point among the mainstream media and other mouthpieces of the establishment is that voter fraud, at least to a degree that could sway an election, doesn’t happen in America; that it’s only found in third-world countries but could never take place in a nation as sophisticated as ours.
Such assurances fly in the face of reality. In fact, voter fraud has been a long-time fixture of American politics and anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant of history or deliberately trying to obfuscate the truth.
Anyone who has studied urban political operations, especially the infamous Tammany Hall machine, knows that vote fraud, including dead people voting and party bosses filling out absentee ballots on behalf of voters, has been a fact of life since at least the 19th century.
Perhaps the most famous case of voter fraud is Lyndon Baines Johnson’s 1948 stealing of the U.S. Senate race against former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson. This election stands out because of its significance for America — Johnson had already forsaken his House seat and lost a Senate race in 1941, so a loss in 1948 would have ended his political career and prevented him from reaching the presidency — and because the fraud has been conclusively and definitively proven, even to the point of the biggest participants in the steal admitting to what they did years after.
As The New American previously noted, LBJ overcame an 11,000-vote Election Night deficit against the conservative former governor in the Democrat primary thanks to tens of thousands of “block votes” he purchased, particularly from the Rio Grande Valley, where a group of corrupt political bosses took advantage of the heavy Mexican demographic’s willingness to play along and keep quiet in obeisance to their powerful patrones (Spanish for “bosses” or “chief”), who would win over commoners with favors (giving a local family cash for funeral expenses, helping an old lady with her medical bills, etc.) and silence dissidents at gunpoint.
The ringleader of the Valley’s political bosses was George Parr, a sheriff and county judge known, like his father before him, as the “Duke of Duval” County.
Parr’s dominion encompassed seven counties; he ruled Duval, Brooks, and Jim Hogg counties as a virtual satrapy and his control extended into Zapata, Webb, La Salle, and Starr counties through alliances with lesser local bosses.
In Precinct 13 of the city of Alice in Jim Wells County, the precinct in which the mysterious last-minute 200 votes that pushed Johnson over the edge to an 87-vote victory were “found,” the votes were supervised by Parr’s enforcer, a tall, burly, savage Mexican by the name of Luis Salas, better known as the “Indio.”
Salas left many a man near-death in fist fights and carried a revolver around his hip, often under the guise of the law (Parr made him a city policeman in Alice and a deputy sheriff in Duval, Jim Wells, and Nueces counties).
“In all these years, George told me to give our candidate 80 percent of the total votes, regardless if the people voted against us,” Salas told author Robert Caro, as recounted in the book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent.
How did Salas and other vote-sellers ensure their client, Johnson, won the election?
One method was getting the dead to vote.
As detailed in Means of Ascent:
The number of votes at the patrones’ command was not necessarily limited by the number of eligible voters. Since voters over the age of sixty were not required to pay poll taxes, and since poll tax lists were checked irregularly to eliminate the names of those who died after sixty, “in the Valley,” as one expert on the subject puts it, “the ‘machine’ votes the dead men.”
In many cases, votes were cast on behalf of individuals without their knowledge, as in the case of a young man who testified at the behest of the Stevenson team that, although a ballot was cast in his name, he had in fact been out of town and not voted when the election occurred.
Even non-citizens were utilized to give Parr’s candidates an edge. Caro writes:
Nor was American citizenship necessarily a requirement; on Election Day, voters were recruited in saloons on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande and brought across in truckloads to vote on the American side. Starr County was “an excellent location for bringing voters from across the border, a commentator notes. In Webb County, the small town of Dolores had about 100 American citizens — and in some elections recorded as many as 400 votes.
Of course, in many instances, physical voters weren’t used at all. In precincts where the bosses had total control, such as the Salas-run Precinct 13 in Alice, they would simply add to the tally sheet as many votes as their candidate needed. This was the case with the scandalous 200 votes, which were a product of Parr, seeing that Johnson was still about 150 votes short a week after the Election, ordering Salas to say that the Johnson vote count was not the 765 originally reported, but 965 (one of Stevenson’s attorneys, who saw the original tally sheet, said the “9” in the 965 had the appearance of having been a “7,” with a loop added to it to turn it into a “9”).
The Johnson camp could afford all this thanks to the virtually unlimited financial resources of the interests who backed him, from Texas oil magnates to federal contractors such as Brown & Root to liberal Northeastern businessmen. Johnson’s 1948 Senate bid was, at the time, the most expensive campaign in the history of Texas.
A ruling from Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black halted the trial and investigation of the fraud just minutes before the vote boxes whose contents would have proved the tampering of the count were to be opened in court. But those involved in the steal later admitted the truth. Salas, for example, told Caro that he lied under oath and did, in fact, falsify votes for Johnson, opening for the Democrat “the road to reach the presidency of this country.”
“This is history like it or not, nobody can erase these facts,” Salas said.
The shocking turn of events of the 1948 Senate race in Texas was not unlike what Americans witnessed in the 2020 presidential race: A popular candidate appeared to have the contest all but wrapped up on Election Night; then, in subsequent days, that lead was gradually eroded as new ballots, overwhelmingly skewed in favor of his opponent, were “discovered” in precincts known for their corrupt politics.
Then, as now, the reason for the delay in reporting is clear: The bosses instructed their elections officials not to report their tallies until the rest of the state had already done so, allowing them to know how many ballots they needed to fabricate. LBJ lost his first Senate bid in 1941 because, already in the lead, he mistakenly told Parr and company to report their results immediately, allowing opponent W. Lee O’Daniel’s men to falsify the right amount of votes to push him over the top.
In 1948, turnout percentages in the 80s and 90s alerted observers to the scam. In 2020, cities responsible for Biden’s victory likewise had unprecedented turnout in the 80s and 90s.
In 1948, the media, which largely supported liberal and New Deal-supporter Johnson over conservative “neanderthal” Stevenson, took Johnson’s claims at face value and for years thereafter enshrined the narrative that the Stevenson camp were merely sore losers.
And in 1948, as in 2020, the courts, all the way to the Supreme Court, ultimately failed to deliver justice.
In the Johnson case, it was thanks to the brilliant political maneuvering of his army of lawyers and the local election officials he bought. A common stalling tactic in court by such officials on the Johnson side was saying that they had conveniently “lost” the vote tally sheets and otherwise doing all they could to prevent an inspection of the original records — not unlike Democrat precincts today, where officials resist efforts to audit and have even moved to destroy records as quickly as possible.
Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Sadly, due in part to a mass media and leftist academia that misinforms and disinforms the public, we failed to learn in time to prevent a repetition of 1948 on a much grander scale in 2020.
Now, whether President Trump wins the fight or loses, Americans’ faith in the integrity of our electoral system has forever been shattered.
