For the Record 10/14/20

Posted

Throughout the course of the current presidential campaign, President Trump has expressed concern about the threat of Democrats stealing the election. His concerns are well founded. This is the story of how Democrats have been stealing elections all over the country — including here in Missouri – for 150 years.
It has taken considerable time to bring you this story, but for me it’s been worth the effort and I hope you find it enlightening.
This story starts with William M. “Boss” Tweed, the head of the Democratic Party in New York during the late 1860s and early 1870s. It would have been difficult to bring you much of the details of Tweed, except that I still had one of my old college history books that went into much more detail than today’s college texts. The book used in my class devoted six pages to Tweed and machine politics in New York. The more recent versions allotted one page or less.
How times have changed since my textbook came out in 1959, my freshman year in college. That year Tweed was described as a Democrat. The more recent college texts seem to have overlooked the fact Tweed was a Democrat. He was indeed a Democrat, succeeding in electing not only New York City officials, but also the governor of the state.
All of the textbooks reflected that Tweed’s power rested on his control of immigrant voting. Once he got total control, he went a little wacky – somewhat reminiscent of Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. He built a courthouse in New York that was originally estimated to cost $250,000, but ended up running $13 million.
Tweed made his personal fortune by requiring contractors to add a percentage to their contracts with the city and give this money to the boss. Originally, Tweed extracted 10 percent, but this was to grow to 66 percent and finally 85 percent. It is estimated Tweed “plundered” between $45 million and $100 million, enough at that time to buy a good part of the state of Missouri.
Several of the books pointed out that Tweed was the subject of cartoonist Thomas Nast in Harper’s magazine. One of the new books stated that the New York Times frequently editorialized against Tweed. (It’s difficult to imagine the Times coming out against a Democrat, isn’t it?) The editorials didn’t trouble Tweed as much as the cartoons. Many of the immigrants he controlled couldn’t read the editorials, but they could “look at the damn pictures,” Tweed said, and he offered Nast money to go abroad to study art.
The Tweed story shows how difficult it is to stop corruption. Where do the good guys get the facts they need to bring criminality to a halt. In Tweed’s case — as in the Pendergast case and a 1982 case from Chicago, both of which I will get to later — disgruntled insiders brought down the machine. The Tweed insider gave the city’s financial books to a reporter and such an uproar ensued that Tweed lost his power in the 1871 elections. In 1873 he was tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. In 1875 he escaped from prison, was later captured and died “friendless and penniless” shortly thereafter.
The corruption didn’t stop with Tweed’s topple from power. He was succeeded by Richard Croker, and as my old textbook states, “…the whole cycle of corruption and reform was to be repeated.” Croker was to rule until 1901.
In my 1959 textbook, the authors stated: “Lesser thieves plundered other cities almost as thoroughly. In Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, politicians perfected the fine art of ‘boodling’” — the kickback described above.
Edward “Boss” Butler was the head of the Democratic Party in St. Louis from around 1876 until 1904, when he was convicted of bribery. Butler controlled city finances and gave lucrative contracts for kickbacks to a preferred group of prominent businessmen referred to as the Big Cinch.
Joseph W. “Holy Joe” Folk was elected city attorney in 1902 and quickly moved to prosecute Butler and his business cronies and in 1904 got a conviction against Butler in a case heard in Columbia on a change of venue. The conviction was later overturned by the Missouri Supreme Court, but Folk’s campaign against Butler and the Big Cinch proved to be popular with voters and Folk was elected governor in 1904.
While I could find not a single mention of Butler in history texts at my disposal, he is mentioned in a number of relatively brief Internet articles. The most interesting thing I could find came from a story by Ken Zimmerman Jr., who wrote: “In the November 20, 1904 edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Butler asserted that St. Louis was a Republican town. He further states that Joe Brown was the only truly elected Democratic mayor over the past twenty-five years. According to Butler, every other election had been stolen by the Democratic machine.”
Butler came to power in St. Louis shortly after Tweed was toppled in New York. Butler used better judgment than Tweed and didn’t bring attention to himself and as a result succeeded in holding on to the strings of power for more than a quarter of a century.
On Missouri’s west side, Tom Pendergast was more colorful and more powerful than Butler. He controlled the Democratic Party in Kansas City and Jackson County from 1925 until 1939. Not only did Pendergast’s followers — at least those who were among the living — vote early and vote often, Pendergast controlled the votes of at least 60,000 cemetery residents, and some claim as many as 80,000. He was obviously a force to be reckoned with.
I know of no history textbooks that have the Pendergast story, but there are numerous stories about him on the Internet.
Under Pendergast Kansas City became a wide-open city, with every sort of vice imaginable. Elections in Kansas City were unimaginable. In the 1934 election the machine came under federal scrutiny when thousands of fraudulent ballots were cast, four were murdered at polling places and 11 voters shot. Can you believe Democrats have the gall to accuse Republicans of voter intimidation?
In the 1936 election more votes were cast than the number of registered voters. This led to federal judge Albert J. Reeves naming a grand jury. U.S. Attorney Maurice Milligan prosecuted those who were indicted and obtained 259 convictions.
Pendergast’s most famous protégé was Harry S Truman, who was elected to a Jackson County office with Pendergast’s support and was later elected and then reelected as U.S. Senator from Missouri, with margins provided by the Pendergast machine.
I’ve always been troubled by Truman’s connections with Pendergast. We got lucky with Truman. He turned out to be a good president. If vote stealing this year leads to the election of Joe Biden, the results will be ugly.
In 1951 the Communist governments of North Korea and China sent troops to invade South Korea. Just six years after the end of World War II, Truman had to put American soldiers in harm’s way to stop the march of Communism. There is no Harry Truman anti-Communist blood flowing through the veins of Joe Biden. China would be delighted to see him as our president.
There is nothing to challenge about the stories I’ve presented up to this point. Boss Tweed existed and did all the things I told you about. The same goes for Boss Butler of St. Louis and Boss Pendergast of Kansas City. Political bosses steal votes, get their candidates elected and change the course of history.
Joe Biden recently said he is the face of the Democratic Party. That’s partially true, but so are Boss Tweed, Boss Butler and Boss Pendergast. Corruption has been an intimate part of the Democratic Party since the outset of the party and still is.
So far, I’ve talked about three bosses. I’m now going to talk about two specific election contests. One was the 1948 Democratic primary race in Texas between Lyndon Johnson, who was to become president in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and former Texas Governor Coke Stevenson. The two men were running for that state’s U.S. Senate seat. As will be clearly shown, Johnson stole that election.
The second race I’m going to tell you about is the 1982 gubernatorial race in Illinois between incumbent Republican James Thompson and Democrat Adlai Stevenson Jr., the U.S. Senator from Illinois. These two contests are crucial because they not only show how willing Democrats are to steal votes, either from fellow Democrats or from Republicans, but they also show why President Trump is fully justified in opposing Democratic vote stealing and what remedy he should seek.
In 2007 I summarized the 1948 Texas election in three columns I wrote in August and September of that year. Those columns appeared in the Unterrified Democrat and are set out on the U.D. website.
The basis of those columns is a book written by Robert A. Caro, one of America’s preeminent historians. The book – Means of Ascent – is Volume 2 of Caro’s multi-volume set of the life of Lyndon Johnson. There will eventually be five volumes, but only four have been released to date.
You won’t understand Democrats and how they have changed the course of history in this country until you read Volume 2. I fully understand there is little chance of getting people to invest in reading the entire book, but I hope some of you will read my summary and this will help you understand what Trump is up against.
The protagonists in that 1948 race were exact opposites. Coke Stevenson, the remarkably popular former governor of Texas, was as honorable as a human can be. Caro devoted dozens of pages to explain just what made him tick. Johnson, on the other hand, was shown to be one of the most rudderless people to have ever lived. It was easy to catch Johnson in a lie. The trick was to catch him in the truth. To win, Johnson had to destroy a living legend and also steal tens of thousands of votes. He effectively did both. Note that this was a contest between Democrats.
In making Johnson look evil and Stevenson look virtuous, Caro was not showing favoritism in any way. He is an old-fashioned liberal, which means he tells the truth and the whole truth. If you want an enjoyable experience and you want to see why liberals of old were likeable and admirable characters, read Caro’s book.
In my first column in 2007, I explained the qualities Caro found in Stevenson. In the second column I explained the qualities Caro found in Johnson and how Johnson stole the election. In the third column I explained how Stevenson filed a lawsuit in federal court to prevent Johnson from completing his theft of the election. Please read those columns on the U.D. website.
Stevenson’s federal lawsuit (covered in my third column from 2007) was presided over by Judge T. Whitfield Davidson, a Democrat appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt. When Johnson and Stevenson first appeared in court, Johnson was very confident the judge would throw out the case due to lack of jurisdiction. Johnson and his attorneys were shocked when the judge ruled he would hear the case.
The next day 13 witnesses testified as to how the poll list in a precinct in south Texas had been changed and 201 names added days after the election and people who were dead or out of town that day were listed as having voted. Later in the day the judge made a statement that shook Johnson and his attorneys even more. If Stevenson’s “allegations be true, then the complainant has been wronged,” the judge said. “He has had a seat in the Senate of the United States taken away from him…[If] enough ballots were stuffed to have changed the result…manifestly, that is a wrong.”
The judge went on to comment that Johnson had not presented “one word of evidence,” and had prevented anyone else from presenting it because of the injunction in state court. He went on to add: “Whenever I steal, whenever I misappropriate, whenever I stuff a ballot box, we are taking from a man that which is his. We are not only taking from him that which is his, but we are depriving other voters of their right to choose, by offsetting the vote they cast.”
What Judge Davidson said 72 years ago was true then and is true today. Not only was Gov. Stevenson cheated, but all of his supporters were also cheated. If Democrats steal enough votes in strategic states next month, not only is Donald Trump going to be cheated, but millions of his supporters are also going to be cheated.
In spite of the damning evidence that had been introduced in Judge Davidson’s court, one U.S. Supreme Court judge, Hugo Black, was called on to stop the hearing and he did so. I challenge you to find any report of this is a textbook. I also challenge you to find a report in a textbook that says Black and Johnson in the early 1940s were members of a small group of young up-and-coming Democrats who “got together often” socially. Democrats never, never recuse. That’s strictly for Republicans. For their long-time close relationship, look at Page 12 of Caro’s book.
One last thought on the 1948 election: Caro’s book – all four volumes -- can be found in our local library, where the folks at the library are more than happy to let you check out any one of the volumes, or all four, and you can take them home to read at your leisure. In St. Louis County, the largest county in the state with a population of 996,000, the library will not let you leave the library with Volume 2. You may look at it only in the reference section. You can take 1, 3 or 4 home with you. An individual or group at that library does not want you to think poorly of Democrats. They especially do not want you to consider the possibility that the Kennedy-Johnson ticket in 1960 stole the election. If Johnson was able to steal tens of thousands of votes in 1948 to get elected to the U.S. Senate, isn’t it likely 12 years later he stole enough votes to tip the scales of that election in Texas? If it happened – and I think it did – then Richard Nixon is not the villain the left says he is.
Let’s look at the 1982 Illinois case involving the contest between Republican incumbent Governor Jim Thompson and his Democratic challenger, Sen. Adlai Stevenson Jr. The report of this case was made by the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank. There is a link to the report on the U.D. web page, or you can search for it, using Bing or Google, “Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire: 100,000 stolen votes in Chicago.”
This report is a must-read for people who want good government. In comparison to Caro’s book, it’s brief, but it shows in considerable detail how Democrats steal votes in Chicago and how the knowledge of how to steal votes has been passed down over the years. Vote stealing is not a new thing in Chicago, it’s a tradition that’s been handed down like a family heirloom.
There is one thing I would point out at this time: Democrats are experienced at stealing votes. Most Republicans would not know how to go about stealing votes. Do we Republicans understand enough about voter fraud that we can defend against it?
I’m not going to go into the facts in much detail. You can do that. The Republican candidate narrowly won, even though he had a huge lead in the polls going into the election. An estimated 100,000 votes were stolen, 31,000 people voted twice, thousands of ghost votes were cast, an estimated 80,000 illegal aliens were registered to vote, one straight Democrat ballot was run through the voting machine at least 198 times, 65 people were indicted by a grand jury and all were convicted except one who died and another who was ruled incompetent to stand trial.
It should be noted that the Heritage Foundation story says “the federal investigation was really sparked by a party worker from Chicago’s 39th Ward who was upset by his precinct captain’s broken promise to award him a city job for his participation in the voter fraud.” Had this not occurred, this story may well have gone relatively unnoticed and unreported. It’s not easy to ferret out voter fraud.
Many liberal think tanks and other organizations say that reports of voter fraud seldom “pan out.” Most of the media make the same claim. Those claims are just patently false.
The most important part of this report are the findings and recommendations of the grand jury.
The grand jury found there was no bipartisan election system, in part because there were not enough Republicans to provide a counterbalance and also because Democrats often filled Republican spots with Democrats masquerading as Republicans.
What is bipartisan about the Post Office? Realize fully well that almost all of our mail in Missouri is sorted in the state’s larger cities, where for the most part the Democrats have control. What is to prevent a postal employee from dumping a tray of ballots from Osage County? Not a thing. An example of this has already occurred recently in another state. When you consider Hillary only got 13% of the votes in Osage County four years ago, a lot of Trump votes would be destroyed if Osage County ballots get trashed.
I would strongly urge all voters to vote in person, when possible, or if you vote an absentee ballot, make sure it gets returned to the office of the county clerk.
The most important recommendation of the Chicago grand jury was that all voters should be required to provide a thumb print when registering and when voting. While this recommendation has not been adopted in the U.S., it has become the law in Mexico and helped reduce voter fraud, the report said. Note that this recommendation was made by a grand jury comprised of people from the Chicago area. I think most people want a fair election, but our Democratic politicians and their media friends have the clout to prevent this from happening.
There is a price to pay for not having fair elections: A corrupt one-party system has severely damaged Chicago and the state of Illinois. Governments in Illinois have been unable to pay their bills in a timely manner for years – and this was before Covid. Illinois pensions are in real trouble – and were before Covid. Voters and businesses are leaving the state, and this will increase the problems.
Pelosi and Schumer are working frantically to get billions into Illinois, California, New York and other blue states to prop them up. Many blue states were in trouble long before Covid came along. The rest of the country should not have to bail them out. State workers in Missouri are among the lowest paid in the nation. It would be grossly unfair to expect them to come to the aid of their much higher-paid counterparts in some of the blue states.
Should we be concerned about voter fraud that has taken place in the past? Absolutely. The man who wrote the story on the Chicago election, is still digging. He recently reported there were more than 144,000 cases of potential voter fraud in the 2016 and 2018 election. He also learned that there are 28 million mail-in ballots unaccounted for in the past four elections, 2012 through 2018; 349,000 dead people on the rolls in 41 states, with over half of that number being in five states, with two of those five states being battleground states; there are thousands of people registered in two states, who voted in both states in recent elections; and thousands registered at two addresses in the same state, who voted from both addresses.
The media are pressing Trump to commit to vacating the White House if he loses. They don’t ask Biden that question. Hillary has advised Biden to never concede. The Democrats fully intend to steal this election.
What’s going to happen on Nov. 3? I think Trump will win if it’s an honest election. I hope for the best, but fear the worst. What if we have numerous examples of the 1982 Chicago election or the Lyndon Johnson election taking place all over the country?
If the races are close – Trump not only needs to fight for his job, he also needs to protect Congressional Republicans – and it appears there are many fraudulent ballots floating around, I think Trump will have no choice but to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the 1964 reapportionment cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said “one person, one vote” was the law of the land and required all states to draw their legislative districts with roughly the same populations. Is it fair for Democrats to be able to vote more often than Republicans? If Trump can prove that Democrats have voted early and voted often, such as the 31,000 that voted twice in Chicago, why should that election stand? Because the Supreme Court is so important to the final outcome of the November election , it is imperative the Senate approve the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett.
If there is good evidence of vote stealing, Trump should not throw in the towel. He should ask the Supreme Court to throw out the election and order a new one. And he should also ask the court to let him serve until the new election has been held and certified. Why should the Democrats be allowed to benefit from their vote stealing? If there is enough evidence to justify a new election, Trump should stay in office. The Court should be asked to require one other thing in the new election. Voters should be identified by a finger print or facial recognition technology. The Constitution requires “one person, one vote” – that clearly prohibits Democrats voting numerous times, while Republicans vote only once. One hundred fifty years of vote stealing is enough.

For the Record Links

08/20/07

08/29/07

09/05/07

12 recent stories of election tampering

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-attorney-general-ken-paxton-voter-fraud

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/09/24/mcenany-pennsylvania-ballots-for-trump-were-found-in-the-trash-n2576851?utm_source=thdailypm&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=09/24/2020&bcid=d83c680368ee5546742573f1fcddc840&recip=5005331

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/military-ballots-trump-pennsylvania

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/virginia-counties-multiple-absentee-ballots-sent-more-than-1000-voters

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/minneapolis-police-omar-ballot-harvesting

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/nyc-mismarked-absentee-ballots-confusion

https://www.foxnews.com/us/florida-man-requested-mail-ballot-dead-wife-havent-done-anything-wrong

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-mayoral-candidate-arrested-for-mail-in-ballot-fraud

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ohios-franklin-county-sees-nearly-50k-voters-getting-wrong-absentee-ballots-elections-officials-say

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-unofficial-ballot-drop-off-boxes

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-voter-turnout-democratic-firm-newsom