My latest in PJ Media:
While the Left is acting as if it is unthinkable – absolutely inconceivable! – that a presidential election can be stolen, and that to suspect otherwise is to venture deep into tinfoil-hat territory, in reality, this kind of thing has happened before, and it’s high time it all came out and safeguards were implemented. In Stephen King’s novel 11/22/63 (spoiler alert!), the main character, Jake, travels back in time to try to stop Lee Harvey Oswald from shooting John F. Kennedy. Even though King drops Jake off in 1958, giving him five years in the Good Old Days, the great novelist never thinks to offer him the easiest way to ensure that Kennedy survives: rather than stopping Oswald, he could have had Jake stop JFK from stealing the 1960 presidential election from Richard Nixon.
As Rating America’s Presidents notes, the 1960 campaign is famous not for voter fraud, but for the televised debates between Nixon and Kennedy, the first debates between the presidential candidates of each major party. The effect of television may have decided the election. A majority of those who listened to the first debate on the radio thought Nixon had won, but on television, he had unwisely eschewed makeup and sweated profusely under the hot lights, making him look nervous and shifty. Most TV viewers thought Kennedy had won.
Nevertheless, the election itself was extremely close, with Kennedy winning only 112,000 more popular votes than Nixon, out of over 68 million cast; in the Congressional Quarterly’s count, Nixon won the popular vote.
Illinois and Texas decided the contest. Both were quite close themselves: if Nixon had won forty-seven thousand more votes in Texas (the home state of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson) and ten thousand in Illinois (where Democratic machine boss Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago, held sway), he would have become president.
There was significant evidence that the Kennedy machine had committed voter fraud in both states. In Illinois, Daley’s Chicago machine made it easy: five days before the election, a Chicago group called the Committee on Honest Elections issued a report documenting its contention that fully ten percent of the people on Chicago voter rolls were listed as living in bars, barbershops, vacant lots and the like. Many had moved; many others were dead. The Committee also found unregistered voters having cast votes, including some who were apparently altogether fictional.
There is much more. Read the rest here.