[Magdalen] Election Day

[Eleanor Braun]

On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 8:35 AM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I often see that in videos of voting in other countries and wonder
> whether Chicago would be as famous for "vote early and often" if we
> had inked each voter here.
>
>

Wouldn't have prevented "Landslide Lyndon" from being elected to the US
Senate in 1948.  As the Houston Chronicle tells the tale:

On this date [August 28] in 1948, Box 13 in Duval County provided Lyndon
Johnson the victory margin as the gangly congressman from Johnson City won
a hotly contested Senate race by 87 votes.

Six days after election, authorities in Alice (now in Jim Wells County)
“discovered” 202 additional ballots in precinct #13 that had not been
counted.

Johnson received 200 of those votes. His opponent, Coke Stevenson, got two.

Stevenson’s razor-thin lead melted away and “Landslide Lyndon,” who
believed that the 1941 Senate race had been stolen from him, was the winner
in yet another deeply disputed election.
Later, it was reported that the ballots seemed to be written in the same
ink. And the voters allegedly voted in alphabetical order.

----------------

Many years later I was part of a group from the Women's Political Caucus,
sanctioned by the Secretary of State, along with representatives from the
Attorney General's office and the Texas Rangers, who oversaw an election in
Alice which included a woman math teacher running for the state
legislature.  With all that oversight, the locals ran the election and
counted the votes according to law.  But it was clear that it was a novelty
for them.  The woman was elected, and became one of the great advocates for
children and for education in the legislature.

Eleanor