No, The 1960 Election Wasn’t Stolen

And even if it was — again, it wasn’t, but even if it was, Nixon would have lost anyway.

For the past couple of weeks, Donald Trump has been trying to divert attention away from the revelation that he is a misogynist and sexual predator by claiming that the evidence of this, or rather that the evidence of his misogyny and sexual predation coming to light, is evidence that the current presidential election is “rigged” against him. That massive voter fraud, coordinated and conducted by shadowy figures, beholden to Wall Street and “the international bankers,” with the tacit approval and involvement of the news media, the Clinton campaign and even certain members of his own party, will rob him of the prize that he feels is rightfully his as the King of All Deal Makers and Savior of the Nation, the presidency. This claim, repeated time and again at his rallies and during television appearances, is backed by not one single piece of credible evidence presented either by Trump or any of his campaign surrogates. The mere circumstance that the news media is doing its job by reporting facts about the candidate that are clearly both newsworthy and in the public interest, but that paint the candidate in a negative light, is what Trump and his supporters point to as “evidence” of the conspiracy. But we all know this already and I don’t intend to spend any more time thinking or writing about why this is all bad and weird. What it has prompted me to do, however, is to think about the myth of the so-called stolen election of 1960.

A lot of investigation has already gone into whether or not electoral fraud determined the outcome of the 1960 presidential election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and no one, either at that time or since, has been able to prove that there was fraud. Even investigations that found that fraud may have occurred, concluded that it would not have been substantial enough to alter the results of the election. Inspite of all this, the legend that somehow Joe Kennedy and the Daley Machine in Chicago were able to deliver enough fake votes in Illinois to give Kennedy the 113,000 popular vote margin by which he won the White House persists today and is believed even by people whom you would think know better.

Why should they know better? Forget about all of the aforementioned investigations and their findings or lack thereof. First, they should already know that U.S. Presidential elections don’t work that way. A popular vote plurality, even a majority, does not determine the winner, as Al Gore can attest. The electoral college, whose votes are based on the total of each state’s combined representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and determined and awarded by the popular vote in each individual state determines the winner. Win more electors’ votes than the other guy and BOOM, you’re the President. Secondly, they should know better because of math. Yeah, math.

I’ll explain: According to vote totals in each of the states in 1960, Kennedy won the electoral college by a vote of 303 to 219. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that massive electoral fraud did happen in Cook County, Illinois (which Kennedy won by an astonishing 450,000 votes) and the fraud was discovered and corrected by the courts. Take Illinois away from Kennedy and award the state’s then 27 electoral votes to Nixon. Voila, the new electoral tally is Kennedy 276, Nixon 246. Kennedy still wins. You can pretty much do that same thought exercise with every other state’s electoral votes where fraud might have been alleged to have occurred. Kennedy wins every time.

I know what you’re going to say. “But it could have happened in more than just one state. Isn’t that what Republicans were claiming at the time?” Yes, if it had been proven to have happened simultaneously in more than one state, Nixon might have won. There are a couple of holes in that argument, however: U.S. elections, even national ones, are overseen and administered by each individual state. To coordinate simultaneous voter fraud across multiple states would require a conspiracy so large that it would have been impossible to keep secret. It would eventually have been discovered in all of the investigations that were conducted both immediately after the election and since. No such conspiracy has ever come to light. Which is the other problem with the premise of your question and, incidentally, the problem with all of Trump’s claims of a rigged election. It won’t happen because, frankly, it is very difficult, if not almost impossible, to make happen, especially in an election which is not going to be close, such as this one.

So let’s put to bed once and for all the myth of the stolen election of 1960. And let’s get on with the business of stealing the 2016 election for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Just kidding.

Update: this article has been edited for grammatical, punctuation and sentence structure errors because the author was in a hurry and is a lousy proof reader.