1 gen 1948 anni - TIME: 1948 Texas Senate: What it means for an election to be "rigged"

Descrizione:

Experts say that in all of American history, there has not been a single instance of a presidential election being truly rigged.

That doesn’t mean there has never been a rigged election, period. It has happened—but, despite Trump’s rhetoric, those who study the history say it is less likely to happen in 2016 than before.

In order to understand this point, the first thing to understand is what it means for an election to be “rigged.”

An election can have many problems—technical mistakes, poor administration, discriminatory laws and even individual voter fraud—without being rigged. In order for an election to be truly rigged, there has to be a top-down and intentional manipulation of the result away from what it would have been if the votes had been counted according to whatever the law is at the time, says Pippa Norris, Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. what does it look like when an American election is really rigged?

One modern example, says Edward B. Foley, author of Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, can be found in Lyndon B. Johnson’s race for the Senate in Texas in 1948.

According to the account by Johnson biographer Robert Caro, the future president won a runoff primary by a mere 87 votes, after 200 extra votes were added to what Foley calls “the infamous Ballot Box 13.” That election may well have seen manipulation beyond that instance too, and on both sides. As Foley points out, though there’s no demonstrable evidence that Johnson himself participated in what happened, there were certainly people in the area who had an interest in his victory and who would have been able to make sure it happened. That sort of planned and intentional manipulation qualifies, for Foley, as rigging an election.

It makes sense that any real examples of rigging would happen in something like a Senate primary rather than a national general election; decentralization is cited as one of the main reasons why it would be nigh impossible to rig a presidential election in the United States. The more local you get the more a single authority can control an outcome.

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