Election Fraud is as American as Apple Pie
Ballot-stuffing, other forms of cheating, lying, and chicanery, are all part of the traditions of our grand old democracy
Elections are games with rules, and rules are made to be broken
Anyone who tells you otherwise is full of it, or a Russian agent
“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 …
