Anybody here knows of

[fshrink]

a major national election, anywhere in US history, which would have been discussed as rigged or questionable?

[leftofthedial]

1. is that rhetorical question?

our elections have become an embarassment. We might as well do a reality TV show and gradually vote all but the "winner" off the island.

[fshrink]

2. No it's not actually!

I ask this because I feel like people have completely lost track of the enormity of the thing. It's like having screwed elections is normal. Did something like that, or close enough, EVER happened? Because if it hasn't, it would be worth reminding people.

[phantom power]

3. there is a long history of election fraud in America.

I'm not exactly sure if it's ever been documented relative to the presidency, but I recall learning about various election fraud cases in high school history class.

One reason I'm amazed at how credulous people are regarding paperless voting. If history teaches us anything, it's that there will always be politicians willing to game the system at any opportunity.

[leftofthedial]

7. we've passed "through the looking glass" in so many ways

in the past 4 years that I think most people are numb to reality.

They are at a weird stage of brainwashing in which they believe what they see on TV, even when their own eyes or experience confirm the opposite is true in "reality."

Soon, the dogma will so supplant any kind of experience that they won't require the TV to tell them what is "true," they'll just chant slogans. TV then will be "1984 TV," merely reinforcing the slogans, with "news" made up of whole cloth designed not to mislead or slant the truth about some actual event, but to create a purely fictional alternate reality.

[Philostopher]

4. There was a big flap over the Hayes-Tilden election in 1876

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/dec2000/1876-d21.shtml

I've read about it elsewhere -- somebody posted some info about this election here the other day, I don't remember hearing much about this in history class in high school, but my history teacher was one of those guys who really pushed us more on modern events, linking them to historical events as they came up -- and since there wasn't any egregious fraud in 1976 or 1980 that I can recall, he didn't lean on this one too heavily.

There were accusations from both sides about the 1960 election, of course, as well. Lots of dead people in Chicago voted for JFK; lots of dead people in southern Illinois voted for Dick Nixon and, as someone has pointed out here every time the topic comes up, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 hadn't been passed yet, so lots of minority voters who would have voted for JFK didn't get to vote.

Anybody who thinks LBJ played it strictly by the rules is dreaming. He's the guy who, during a senate run in Texas, wanted his campaign manager to start a whispering campaign about his opponent, who owned a pig ranch, that he enjoyed sexual congress with his pigs. "We can't say he fucks pigs! That's dishonest! You know he doesn't do that," the campaign manager argued.

"I'm sure he doesn't. Make the sonofabitch deny it," LBJ is said to have replied.

(on edit -- this story may be apocryphal, but from what I've heard about LBJ, it's believable enough and I've seen it repeated many times, so I can't vouch for its veracity!)

I'm quite sure there have been small pockets of fraud involved in democratic elections anywhere they're held. The ways to cheat the system always have been innumerable, what we're dealing with now is only new in that a lot of people who might be scandalized by it can't understand the technology that allows it, so it's easier for them to pretend it doesn't happen -- out of sight, out of mind.

[politicat]

5. The better question is: Has there been an election where there was not?

We have a lackadaisical media, but the discussion is there. However, Mr. Pcat tells me that in parts of West Virginia, where he grew up, if you're not offered money, a job, a drink or something similar for your vote, it's insulting. Voter bribery is rampant and expected.

I have a friend from Chicago who shrugs at this mess and basically chalks it up to the export of best practices from the old Daley machine. Growing up in Arizona, the common cultural joke was every vote counts, but white, Mormon votes count twice. (This being the only way we could explain why a state that was 60% Hispanic and Native American kept electing rich, white, Mormon crooks.) I don't think these urban myths come into existence without at least some shred of truth.

Sinclair Lewis documents some voter fraud in Chicago in the early 20th century in The Jungle. There's massive documentation of fraud at about the same time in Kansas City, MO, as the city was run by a political machine. New York only got their issues cleaned up in the 30s. The South is one long story of voter intimidation and fraud.

I know that the Republicans have played dirty tricks in Colorado politics for at least 30 years. To voter fraud? I don't know. I do know that it was at one time common practice to send in bogus voter registration change of address cards to Democratic precincts. And it happened this year.

So.... I don't think anything's changed. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss... Boss Tweed.

Pcat

[leftofthedial]

8. there have been local political machines

Some rural areas, for example, and Chicago during the heyday of the Daley Machine.

But there has never been manipulation and corruption on a scale like 2000. 2002 and 2004.

there never has been a voting system (that is, unauditable "virtual" voting) that could allow fraud on the scale that is now possible.

It is disingenuous to compare historical examples of limited small-town or rural corruption to what is going on now.

[politicat]

9. No, I disagree. The difference is that it was an endemic, grassroots

problem everywhere for much of a century starting in 1850, but it was not organized.

Now, the system is topdown, and the corruption of the system comes not from the local organizations, but from the national machine.

But - the level of corruption seems to be equivalent in a per capita ratio, and we're more aware of it and more vocal about it. If this was 1904 instead of 2004, we'd know the fraud happened, but we would have neither the organization as a community to go after it, nor the media picking up on it at all. In 1904, it was common knowledge that votes were bought, that the polls were manipulated, and that one man, one vote was said with more sarcasm than reverence. In Chicago, it was get a free drink for a straight ticket, in New England cakes were given away for the same. In the South, if you were black and got to vote, you stood a better than even chance of having the vote destroyed, and in parts of the west, groups of men would ride from town to town voting repeatedly and claiming to be just in off the range. Now: same concept, better technology; same rules, but the policy comes from the head office, not middle management.

So stop patronizing me and check your history. D.W. Rogers' Voting and the Spirit of Democracy and Robert J. Dinkin's Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices are very good starter sources.

Pcat

[fshrink]

10. He's got a point though...

A single hacker, with very minimal introductions and help can shift a tight state from one side to the other. This is so quantitatively different that it amounts to a chnage in quality.

[politicat]

12. The more tightly bound politics of the current culture make for a very

different political atmosphere. That dimwit to the north of me, Musky Musgrave, makes a far greater impression on the country as a whole than did her equivalent in office in 1930.

Thus, elections that, 70 years ago, or even 40 years ago, would have been thrown by local manipulation, now have to be thrown by national manipulation, or at least state-wide manipulation, because representatives aren't local anymore. They're not financed locally, they're not "produced" locally, they don't work locally, they're only elected locally.

That's why I think it's just a shift in the management style of the election manipulation process, rather than a full scale change in process. I know it's a small distinction, but I really believe we have to look at this, not as an isolated incident of fraud and intimidation (or even as an isolated set of incidences motivated by the Rove machine), but as a chronic, endemic disease of our electoral process.

To use France as an example, because there is so little voter fraud, and because the system works so well, there's a societal behavioral pattern that says "don't corrupt a working system." Here, since the process is already corrupt, and has been for a very long time, the societal behavioral pattern is to take advantage of the holes in the system.

I think we need real voting reform, and I think it is going to have to be paper ballots, hand counted, and media blackouts on election results for at least a week. We've got to stop being so bloody impatient. The only other alternative is to do away with the secret ballot, and that's not acceptable, either.

Pcat (forgive my tone; I have a cold and it's making me irritable. Nasty headaches, and I'm a bad patient.)

[fshrink]

15. OK. That's agreeable. nt

[leftofthedial]

11. not patronizing, sorry

I don't know (or really care all that much) that there is specific evidence of the magnitude "per capita" of corruption in the past. T=In teh past, as in the present, due to the electoral College, the effectiveness of corruption is not really a function of popular percentage as much as it is a tactical concern.

In any case, I don't think it can be disputed that there has never been the opportunity to commit fraud on the scale now possible.

The only modern election result prior to 2000 that my cursory reading of history indicates was thought by any significant number of people to have turned on fraud, was the Kennedy-Nixon election in which (according to some Republicans) Cook County gave Illinois to Kennedy and Illinois gave the Presidency to Kennedy. I don't believe most historians agree with the theory or dispute that election result.

On the other hand, I believe history (and in fact, current journalism--not US propaganda, but objective journalism) shows that the 2000 election result was fraudulent, if not treason, if not an outright coup. 2002 was likely even more corrupt and 2004 was so statistically anomalous as to be almost absurd.

You're right though, fundamentally. You seem to be better-informed than I on the arcane history of elections. You're post is responsive to the subject in the original post. There indeed have been concerns in the past about the integrity of elections in the US.

I still say it is disingenuous to compare the "haphazard" locally corrupt problems of a pre-Information-Age republic with the systematic fraud that we now have.

[politicat]

13. Apology accepted if you'll accept mine for being snappy.

Sorry, bad cold causing nasty headaches.

The books are interesting - I had a poli-sci prof that I'm working with recommend them in July. They're worth the read even if only for the sense of "we've survived it before, we can survive it again" hope and cock-eyed optimism.

See post above.

As far as 2000-2004 go, yes, they're ugly, they're corrupt, and if we were a developing nation, we'd have UN observers at every poll and the software wouldn't have been an issue. And they're absolutely absurd. (I feel sorry for political thriller novelists these days. They can't write stuff this good and get it to sell...)

As I said above, I think that the systemic, managerial fraud we're experiencing now may be the child of all of the years of locally based fraud and intimidation. Corruption doesn't work well at all in a functional, accountable system, but it thrives in a weakened one. Ours has not been demonstrably functional and accountable for many, many years (especially when you consider low voter turnout as a symptom, as well). The systemic level fraud we're seeing now may merely be the product of consolidation and conglomeration of corruption. After all, why steal one election when you can steal twenty?

Pcat

[leftofthedial]

14. no worries

feel better.

I'll try to find time to read those books. I could use some "survived this before" hope about now.

[fshrink]

6. Well. OK then. But it's weird for me' cause

I grew up in France, and believe I don't put this country forward in anything, but that sort of stuff never ever came up, even in tight and nasty competitions (Prez elections usually resulted in 50.1 to 49.9 type-deal anyways).

[kuozzman]

16. Read these articles from 1988 (I promise their not from 2004)

You could just update the names in them and they would be accurate of today....

http://ignorantusa.tripod.com

This one is pretty ironic as well (also mixed in with other in above link):

http://ignorantusa.tripod.com/bushmachine/

[RaleighNCDUer]

17. There was some talk that Daly gave Chicago, thus Illinois, thus

the election to JFK in '60. Don't know the particulars, but I've heard it brought up.