“Down in Starr County, we throw out every third Republican vote.” The time was the 1970s, and the speaker was a slight acquaintance of my father who at the time was an assistant attorney general assigned to the state highway department. The visitor to our house in Austin laughed as he recounted how the all-Democratic vote-counters in Starr County would pass around ballots: “This one looks illegible to me. What do you think?”

Texans had long known that Starr County and other South Texas counties along the Rio Grande border between the US and Mexico were notorious for their electoral corruption. Since the early twentieth century, these Hispanic-majority counties had been run by Democratic bosses, both Anglos and elite Hispanics. While black Texans were prevented from voting under Jim Crow, Mexican-Americans in some counties both served in office and voted. But of fear or gratitude to the ruling local families they often did as they were told by the bosses.

For their part, the South Texas county bosses manipulated electoral returns in a variety of ways, chiefly through the practice of “voting the Mexicans” in their county as a bloc. The Democratic party machines would pay the poll taxes, designed to exclude poor voters of all races, so that their clients could vote. Sometimes they would provide illiterate voters with knotted strings to be laid alongside the list of names, with knots next to the names of the preferred candidates. Sometimes the election officials just wrote in voter names themselves.

Widespread electoral corruption in South Texas came to the attention of the American public during the 1948 race between the reactionary Dixiecrat Coke Stevenson (a former Texas governor) and the young New Dealer Lyndon B. Johnson (a six-term congressman) for an open US Senate seat. One technique of corrupt party bosses in close races across the US was to refrain from submitting county election returns until they knew exactly how many votes were needed to tip the results to the candidate they favored. When Box 13 from Jim Wells County gave Johnson the victory with a margin of a mere 87 votes, the result was months of litigation that went all the way to the US Supreme Court before Johnson’s win was ratified.

In 1948, Luis Manual Salas was an election judge and a crony of George B. Parr, the boss of Duval County and the heir of a South Texas political dynasty, the “Dukes of Duval.” Decades later in 1977, a year after George Parr had shot himself to avoid going to prison, Salas confessed to an Associated Press reporter: “Johnson did not win the election; it was stolen for him. And I know exactly how it was done.” Salas explained that he had certified two hundred fraudulent votes for Johnson at Parr’s command and then lied about it during a subsequent investigation.

After defeating “Calculating Coke,” “Landslide Lyndon” went on to become Senate Majority Leader, Vice-President, and the most important president of the New Deal era after his mentor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Throughout American history, gaming elections has been a sport practiced by parties in all regions, from small rural counties run by local bosses to big urban party machines like New York’s Tammany Hall. The phrase “vote early and often” referred to those who voted multiple times in the same election in different neighborhoods.

Antebellum voter fraud may have been involved in the death of Edgar Allan Poe in 1849. Poe died in a Baltimore hospital a few days after being found confused and disheveled outside of a polling place on election day. One theory holds that Poe had been “cooped” — kidnapped by partisan hoodlums, filled with alcohol and drugs, and dragged from polling station to polling station to vote multiple times — a common big city practice.

Sometimes voters traveled to other jurisdictions to tip the balance in elections. Between 1854 and 1859, proslavery and antislavery forces battled by means of migration and electoral fraud as well as violence to determine whether “Bleeding Kansas” would be a free state or slave state when the former territory entered the Union. During the 1858 campaigns, Abraham Lincoln warned state Republican Norman B. Judd that Democrats were sending partisan Irish-Americans to vote in parts of Central Illinois in which they were not resident:

“My dear Sir: I now have a high degree of confidence that we shall succeed, if we are not over-run with fraudulent votes to a greater extent than usual. On alighting from the cars and walking three squares at Naples on Monday, I met about fifteen Celtic gentlemen, with black carpet-sacks in their hands. 

…What I most dread is that they will introduce into the doubtful districts numbers of men who are legal voters in all respects except residence and who will swear to residence and thus put it beyond our power to exclude them.”

Lincoln had a practical suggestion for dealing with Democratic voter fraud: “Where there is a known body of these voters, could not a true man, of the ‘detective’ class, be introduced among them in disguise, who could, at the nick of time, control their votes?”

Since Lincoln’s time, charges of electoral fraud and corruption have occurred in key presidential races — with most historians united in suggesting that the charges were true. In the closely contested election of 1877, three Southern states — Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana — sent two alternate sets of ballots. Congress appointed a Republican-majority Electoral Commission, which — surprise! — awarded all of the disputed electoral votes to Rutherford (“Rutherfraud”) B. Hayes, who thus defeated New York Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. In return for Democratic acquiescence in the result, the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction.

Alternate ballots were an issue again in the presidential election of 1960. In the popular vote, Kennedy led Nixon by fewer than 117,000 votes, equivalent to two-tenths of a percentage point. Nixon initially was declared the winner in Hawaii by 140 votes, but a recount later made Kennedy the victor in the state by 115 votes. 

While the controversy over the Hawaii vote may seem like a sideline, given that Kennedy won the election by over 100 electoral votes, historians generally agree that if not for irregularities in the Illinois vote, specifically from a number of key Chicago precincts controlled by Democratic machine boss Richard Daley, Nixon would have won that state, too. If 4,500 voters in Illinois and 24,000 voters in Texas had had their votes counted for Nixon rather than Kennedy, then Nixon would have been elected President. Given the known frequency of electoral fraud in both states, it seems entirely possible that Nixon, not Kennedy, would have won the election if the votes in both states had been fairly counted. 

To this day, scholars study the contested 2000 presidential election, in which a small number of votes in Florida allowed George W. Bush to win in the electoral college even though he lost the popular vote. At issue is the degree of puncturing of “chads” — the perforated boxes that voters punch when casting a vote. According to one study by USA Today and other newspapers, Bush would have won under the “lenient standard” (any alteration to a chad), the “Palm Beach standard” (chad dimpled, not punctured), and the “two corner standard” (at least two or more corners of the chad removed). However, under the “strict standard” (a clean punch that removed the entire chad), Al Gore would have won Florida and the White House by a margin of three votes. 

In almost 60 cases, Republican judges, as well as Democratic ones, have rejected claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Among the Republican officials who rejected Trump’s allegation that he had really won the election were his own Attorney General, William Barr, and his own vice-president, Mike Pence. 

On January 6, 2020, Trump supporters encouraged by Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen by the Democrats entered the US Capitol and disrupted the electoral count over which Pence presided, in a riot that many Democrats absurdly call an “insurrection.” In hindsight, what made 2020 different than 2016 was not that there was outright electoral fraud but that Biden apparently won large numbers of third-party voters who had voted for candidates other than Clinton and Trump four years before. 

While evidence for the proposition that Trump actually won a majority of ballots cast in the 2020 election is thin, it is also a fact that Biden’s victory was helped in key states by prior, ostensibly COVID-related changes to balloting laws that legalized practices like “ballot harvesting” — practices that had previously been considered electoral fraud. Democratic operatives, perhaps scarred by the loss of the Presidency in 2000, boasted of the expensive, months-long effort to effect these changes in post-election interviews, notably in a cover story in Time that described the Party’s efforts to “fortify” the 2020 vote. 

What about voting by immigrants, both illegal and legal, who are not allowed to vote in state and federal elections? Non-citizens have been caught illegally voting in recent elections in Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, Illinois, and Alabama. Because many crimes go undetected and unpunished, the actual number of votes cast by non-citizens in elections is unknown. But the resistance of Democrats to requirements that voters show photo ID at the polls is surely telling. Although poor people must show photo ID to get drugs paid for by Medicaid at drugstores, to get on airplanes, or to buy beer, Democrats claim that great numbers of poor American citizens are unable to provide photo identification at the polls on election day. 

While progressives routinely denounce state photo ID requirements as “racist,” other democratic countries that require voters to show photo ID or tamper-proof government ID cards include Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Israel, Brazil, and Mexico. In contrast, in the state of Colorado, one of the acceptable forms of identification to vote is “a copy of a current (within the last 60 days) utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document that shows the name and address of the elector” — documents that non-citizens in the US can easily supply.

The ease of non-citizen voting in local, state, and federal elections differs from state to state. However, the main impact of mass illegal immigration on the American constitutional system is to increase the influence in the House of Representatives of states like California that encourage illegal immigration. Even if illegal immigrants do not vote in those states in large numbers, the fact that they are included in census counts increases the power of the states in which they reside by increasing the representation of those states in Congress. At the same time, states with large numbers of immigrants, legal and illegal, get more federal money from programs based on population rather than citizenship.

Back in 2015 the Congressional Research Service (CRS) calculated what the difference would be in the allocation of Congressional seats to different states if only US citizens were counted for reapportionment. CRS noted:

“If the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives for the 114th Congress were to be based on the 2013 estimated citizen apportionment population rather than the 2010 total apportionment population, as required by the Constitution, it is estimated that seven seats would shift among 11 states. California would lose four seats relative to its actual distribution of seats as a result of the 2010 apportionment. Texas, Florida, and New York would each lose one seat relative to the number of seats received in the 2010 apportionment. On the other hand, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Virginia would each pick up a single seat, if the 2013 citizen population were used to apportion seats rather than the 2010 total apportionment population.”

CRS concluded: “Using citizenship status to apportion the seats in the US House of Representatives tends to benefit states with smaller immigrant populations and cost states with larger immigrant populations” — both legal and illegal.

Illegal immigration supplies a lot of undeserved money and a lot of undeserved power in Congress to Democratic states like New York and California. (While Florida and Texas also have illegal immigrants, their population growth has been powered by domestic migration that includes citizens fleeing New York and California.) In 1990, there were only 3.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the US. By 2021, there were 10.5 million. In the last three years, the Biden administration has released 2.5 million people into the US, including “parolees” allowed to stay in the country temporarily and foreign nationals claiming to be refugees who are allowed to live in the US until courts can judge their claims — for years, in some cases. 

Then there are the “gotaways” — illegal immigrants who successfully eluded Border Patrol apprehension, vanished into the US, and presumably are still here. In fiscal years 2021 to 2023 alone, under Biden there were an estimated 1.6 million gotaways per year — more than the 1.4 million in the entire decade from 2010 to 2020. As a result of such policies, the illegal immigrant population has grown at least by 43 percent, from 10.5 million in 2020 to nearly 15 million today. If the illegal immigrant population had a state of its own, it would be the fifth largest state in the union, after New York (20 million) and ahead of Pennsylvania (13 million), with a US House delegation of 17 members. That would be a lot of congressional seats and a lot of federal taxpayer subsidies allocated on the basis of population rather than citizenship, even if no voting by illegal immigrants were ever to occur.

You don’t have to be a Texan with a long memory like me to believe that, in a nation of 336 million people — the third most populous country in the world — partisan electoral chicanery in cities, counties, and states is hardly a thing of the past. But I suppose we have a civic duty to encourage the youth to have faith in our democratic institutions and the rules that run them. To any young people reading this, I say: Ignore those who claim that electoral manipulations can occur in contemporary America. Register to vote, in as many jurisdictions as you can. And come Election Day, be a good citizen and vote early and often.