I commented the other day on-line to some friends that “The stories that are coming out of Russia with respect to voter fraud perpetrated by Putin’s party are utterly blatant.”
One of them responded with the quote from a book he’d read:
“Until the late 1960s, political commentators regularly noted that the votes of [Texans] could be, and were, bought and sold like cattle futures; if one bribed acommunity’s patron, he could usually ensure 90-plus percent voter support for the appropriate candidate. In the 1941 Texas Senate race, Lyndon B. Johnson won 90 percent of the vote in […six…] counties by making a single telephone call to local boss George Parr, even though the same six counties had given 95 percent support to his opponent in the governor’s race the year before. Johnson returned to the Senate in 1948 by “winning” 99 percent of the vote in Parr’s home county, where voter turnout was a preposterous 99.6 percent.”
– From American Nations, by Colin Woodard, pp 30, 31.
This make me particularly sad when I think that many of the 57,000 Americans that gave their lives fighting in the Vietnam War did so under LBJ’s leadership. They were told that he was the free and fairly elected representative of the people’s will. I wonder what they’d think now.
Dennis
– research thanks to Alan T.